Sport Corruption
Referees and scoring judges may be offered money, gifts, or other compensation to guarantee a specific outcome in an athletic or other sports competition. A well-known example of this manner of bribery in sport would be the 2002 Olympic Winter Games figure skating scandal, where the French judge in the pairs competition voted for the Russian skaters in order to secure an advantage for the French skaters in the ice dancing competition.
Additionally, bribes may be offered by cities in order to secure athletic franchises, or even competitions, as happened with the 2002 Winter Olympics. It is common practice for cities to "bid" against each other with stadiums, tax benefits, and licensing deals to secure or keep professional sports franchises.
Athletes themselves can be paid to under-perform, generally so that a gambler or gambling syndicate can secure a winning bet. A classic example of this was the 1919 World Series, better known as the Black Sox Scandal.
Finally, in some sports, elements of the game may be tampered with – the classic example being from horse racing, where a groom or other person with access to the horses before the race may be bribed to over-feed an animal, or even administer a sedative or amphetamine (known as "horse doping" in order to make a horse faster or slower to respectively increase or reduce a their chances of winning). Another type of bribery done for financial gain through gambling is to bet against a clear favorite, and ensure that the favorite has an "off day", or attempt to "hop up" a long shot in an attempt to collect big winnings by betting on the heavy odds against it.
Read more about this topic: Bribery
Famous quotes containing the words sport and/or corruption:
“If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can’t go at dawn and not many places he can’t go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking—one sport you shouldn’t have to reserve a time and a court for.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible accusation that any accuser has ever uttered. It is to me the ultimate conceivable corruption. It has possessed the will to the final corruption that is even possible. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity: it has turned every value into a disvalue, every truth into a falsehood, every integrity into a vileness of the soul.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)