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Five of the Oympics' greatest upsets from the last 16 years

Roar Guru
20th July, 2016
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Over the years the Olympics has been home not just to the iconic and legendary, but also the strange, wacky, unexpected and bizarre. Here are a few of the biggest upsets in recent memory.

Eric Moussambani
Eric the eel, as he is known in Olympic folklore, the man from war-torn Equatorial Guinea, won his heat at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games despite never seeing an Olympic-sized swimming pool in his life and only starting his swimming career eight months earlier in a lake.

Seems impossible? Well it almost is. By some fluke, his two fellow competitors made false starts meaning Eric the Eel only had to finish the race to get passed the first stage. That was a struggle though and his time of 1:52:72 wouldn’t have even medalled for the 200-metre freestyle event.

Some see it as a funny, humorous event that he qualified and did what so many better than him couldn’t do, while others say it is simply unacceptable to have that low level of swimming at any world event, let alone the Olympics.

Britain defeat USA in the final of the 4×100 metre relay (2004)
America cruised into the final of this event and it seemed impossible that anyone would get close to them. Each American in the team had recorded times under 10.10 seconds while Britain had no athletes faster than ten seconds meaning it would be nothing short of a miracle for Britain to win.

But with some good fortune and PBs, Britain upset USA to win gold at the event. Their good fortune happened when their batton passing was perfect while the Americans’ was very poor, losing them lots of ground to be beaten by the closest of margins – 1/100th of a second.

Rulon Gardiner defeats Aleksandr Karelin 2000
Russian Aleksandr Karelin had gone undefeated for 13 years, picking up three Olympic gold medals in the process. He even went six years without conceding a single point. He was the king of wrestling and everyone knew. Most people who had heard of wrestling (at that time) would have known the name Karelin.

On the other hand, American dairy farmer Rulon Gardiner’s best performance at a world event was fifth. Two polar opposites and one very obvious gold medal most would have thought but no, on the now famous night in Sydney Rulon Gardiner claimed gold and caused the ultimate upset.

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2004 men’s basketball – Argentina defeats the USA
In 2004 the U.S did not play their best basketballers at the Olympics and it cost them dearly. It was evident from the first round when they went down badly to Puerto Rico. They also went down to Lithuania and narrowly beat Greece to qualify for the knock-out stages.

A win over Spain restored everyone’s faith but then they went down to Argentina in the semi-final. All was not lost, because they then salvaged a consolation Bronze medal, but it is still considered a major upset in Olympic history.

Japan defeats America in the 2008 softball final
Just three years before this major upset, the IOC put forward an argument to eliminate softball from the Olympic games altogether, labelling it too one sided. But then this happened (notably, this was the last time, though, that softball was contested at the Olympics).

It seemed that the predictability of who was going to win the gold medal was going to continue with America winning its first seven games by a considerable margin.

However they then came up against Japan for the third time at those Olympic games, with America having won the first convincingly and the second a bit closer. On the third meeting that match went to a marathon 11th innings, before successive errors from the USA gave Japan the chance to win – and that they did. It goes down as the most unusual result in Olympics history.

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