The Olympics may be an event that is all about athletics, but that doesn’t mean that the most shocking things happen during the tournaments. Throughout the years, incidents from doping scandals to terrorist attacks have made headlines for the Olympics beyond the Games.
Perhaps one of the most famous scandals came out of the 1994 games in Lillehammer when ice skater Nancy Kerrigan was attacked with a baton to the knee, and her longtime Olympic rival, Tonya Harding, was accused of knowing about the attack before it happened, which she has continued to deny. As a result, Harding was banned for life from the U.S. Figure Skating Association, and the story inspired the 2017 film I, Tonya.
Olympic scandals go back as far as 1912 with Jesse Thorpe, who was stripped of his pentathlon and decathlon gold medals after it was revealed he played professional baseball three years prior. (At one point, the Olympics did not allow professional athletes to compete.)
Since then, certain Olympic controversies have made permanent marks on popular culture, from lesser controversies, like a photograph of Michael Phelps smoking pot in college, to scandals with major repercussions, such as Lance Armstrong being stripped of his bronze medal after years of performance-enhancing drug use.
Keep scrolling to see all of the biggest scandals at the Olympics:
