What is the biggest injustice of track and field history?

Actually upon thinking about it further Ivan Pedroso being robbed of the long jump WR is an outlandish robbery. There was no wind that day. It was a clean jump. But the Italians refuse to recognize the record and gave no good reason.

To this day this is a horrible robbery.

rojo wrote:

On a more serious note, I'd say all of the clean athletes over the years who were denied glory. Whether it was steroids with the multis in the 1970s, sprinters in the 80s or EPO in the 90s and 2000s, there are a lot of false heroes who got very rich.

Actually this is the biggest injustice of all and it's on the part of the fans: the stubborn myth that massive doping started in the 70's, and that everyone who competed before then is above suspicion.

Chuck Aragon 1984 1500 meters.

Loot wrote:

Evelyn Ashford being robbed of gold in '88 by steroid loaded Flo Jo. And every female sprinter being robbed of WR's in the 100/200/400 by Flo Jo and equally roided Koch

Thats like saying the doped up guys behind Lance Armstrong were cheated.

No

Ryun was robbed because:

1) He shouldn't have even been in that particular heat to begin with.

He ran a 3:52.8 mile (3rd fastest in history at the time, behind his 2 WRs) in Toronto shortly before the games. Officials misread that as a 1500 time and put him in the heat that he ran in instead of the other heat.

2) He was fouled by a non-competitve no name runner who had never broken 4 minutes in his life.

Replays on a german television station proved this. Howard Cosell helped Jim write a petition after the inept AAU officials left him out to dry. German officials refused to even review the tape and didn't advance him.

3) The sensible thing to do was to advance him to the semi-final. This exact scenario happened at the last Olympics in 2012 in the same event.

Nixon Chepseba was fouled by another runner, fell down, and didn't qualify for the semi-final. He appealed to be advanced to the semi-final. His appeal went through and he competed in the semi and ended up advancing to the final.

Yes in Munich wrote:

Yes, in Munich. It was Ryun's own fault for choosing to run in the middle of the pack. He could have led, run wide, or run at the back to avoid contact. He was not fouled. It was a normal part of 1500m running. He wasn't ready for a physical race. He was clipped and fell. His fault.

It's not even clear that he was clipped. Ryun himself didn't know what happened. The Americans made two very different claims during the appeal process. During the initial appeal, Ryun claimed that a hole in his shoe and a gash on his ankle proved that someone had spiked him. After the initial appeal was denied, however, Timmons claimed that, on videotape, it could be seen that, as Ryun was moving up next to Pakistan's Mohamed Younis, who was to Ryun's left on the inside, Younis's elbow hit Ryun's midsection, causing him to fall. Whether Ryun was passing too close to Younis, or Younis was swinging his arm too wide into Ryun, is a matter of conjecture. It does, however, seem highly probable that whatever contact there was would not have ordinarily caused a fall. As Ryun has acknowledged, a childhood illness had left him with permanent nerve damage in his inner ear, with 50% hearing loss in his right ear and occasional dizziness and equilibrium problems that sometimes caused him to fall after the slightest contact in a race. (In talking about a somewhat similar occurrence in an earlier race following some jostling in the pack, Ryun said, "Someone with good balance would probably have recovered easily," but in his case, "the slightest jarring of my stride can send me down in a heap the next moment.") At the very least, Ryun should have recognized that he was susceptible to such problems and stayed out of trouble. (It was only a heat, not a semi-final; other than Keino, the competition to advance to the next round was not that tough.) A much more serious injustice in that race was to Billy Fordjour of Ghana, who was running next to Ryun on the outside; Ryun crashed into Fordjour, who in turn crashed to the ground. After the race, Fordjour shook Ryun's hand and said that he was sorry about what had happened, but many people over the years have wrongly assumed that Fordjour, who had demonstrated nothing but graciousness and good sportsmanship, was acknowledging his fault in effectively ending Ryun's Olympic career.

Hodgie-san wrote:

John Tarrant:

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/athletics/john-tarrant-sad-shadow-of-the-ghost-runner-still-stalks-the-track-2305959.html

I was going to say Tarrant as well but the computer froze and I gave up. I think he gets my vote.

Thank you for pointing these facts out to the above low-information types. I was about to post the same thing.

I guess those Germans never forgave Ryun for that 36.xx ..... ;)

Doper Ben Johnson robbing Carl Lewis in the 100m.

Hodgie-san wrote:

John Tarrant:

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/athletics/john-tarrant-sad-shadow-of-the-ghost-runner-still-stalks-the-track-2305959.html

Fascinating. Thanks for providing that, and I second your vote.

Hayduke wrote:

Loot wrote:

Evelyn Ashford being robbed of gold in '88 by steroid loaded Flo Jo. And every female sprinter being robbed of WR's in the 100/200/400 by Flo Jo and equally roided Koch

Thats like saying the doped up guys behind Lance Armstrong were cheated.

No, it isn't, because Ashford was not on dope, you worthless peabrain

Watching the 2004 Olympic marathon on t.v. at the time, I thought the attack on de Lima while he was leading at 35k was a horrible injustice. A spectator attacking an athlete is a very different kind of injustice than the cheating and drug use often seen in the sport. The injustice was not the result of the actions of a competitor, but instead the result of the actions of an outsider. The attack also seemed so random, and anyone could have been the target. For some reason, I felt these things made it even more unfair.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderlei_Cordeiro_de_Lima

--Bob Hersh winning 85% of the constituent vote for IAAF rep at the USATF meeting and losing the BOD vote 11-1.

--Suzy Favor-Hamilton vs. Regina Jacobs

--East Germans defrauding for several Olympic cycles

--Russians defrauding the past 40 yrs

--Africans not having out-of-competition drug testing (until recently, thanks to the WMMs) and defrauding the rest of the world the past 20+ yrs.

kmaclam wrote:

Wow, was gonna give some smart arse answer but in light of how civil everyone has been up to now, I'll refrain. Jeneba Tarmoh '12 Trials

Not necessarily a smart arse answer, but this might steer the discussion in a different direction.

If we think of sport merely as a form of recreation or diversion, and injustice as the violation of someone's rights or what is right, then I will state there has not been any injustice in track and field (or any other sport), ever.

Perhaps some competitors (individuals or teams) got shafted at various times, but participating in sport, especially as a professional, is not a right, but a privilege. And I'm sure any good athlete knows that at any given time, for any reason (age, injury, economics, philosophy, etc), the privilege could be gone.

Let the debate begin.

All women's world records up to 1500.

De Lima

Cierpinski

Bumbalough DQ at us indoors and losing 7th.

#FreeJenkins

Not the worst injustice, but the biggest - in that it affected the most people - was the Jimmy Carter's decision to boycott the Moscow Olympics. That affected (destroyed) not one person's Olympic moment, but the entire team.

Bigger than that, of course, is the drug cheats. What they have done hurts the sport to the nth. degree. I don't care how many medals they wear around their necks, and how deeply they rationalize their dishonesty, their drug use is fraud and thievery.

BYU's and to a lesser extent SUU's 25+ year old runners who still have eligibility because they went on "Mormon Missions".

Athletes among the professional ranks (like the newly busted Yulia Zaripova) whose doping is blatantly obvious given their doper's acne. It blows my mind when certain athletes are totally clean-faced for certain parts of the year and then absolutely ridden with full-blown acne come championship season, all on top of being in their mid-twenties to early-thirties and obviously too old for the level of pimple-age they've got going on.

Good summary. They should have advanced him according to the rules then. It was a travesty.