You think the gambling scandals that rock college basketball every 30 or 40 years are bad? Consider if the NCAA champions were cheating by shooting at a bigger hoop. This is worse.
You think it was terrible when Lance Armstrong used blood doping to win seven straight Tour de France titles? Just think if he also had a motor on his bike. This is worse.
You think it was terrible when the New England Patriots deflated footballs? No? Neither do I. I'm not sure how it helped them and it's confusing. But they seemed guilty. This is worse.
One of the world's great sporting events was rocked by scandal this summer (just wait until you hear what sport! Me using "rocked" is funny!). It's a sport you've undoubtedly tried, but I suspect you didn't know involved a world championship. I fact, you probably didn't know it was a sport.
You probably think you're pretty good at it.
Stone-skipping, the "sport" where you see how many times you can make a rock bounce when you throw it across water, faced the greatest scandal this year since the first caveman tried to see if he could bounce a rock across a river inhabited by dinosaurs and dragons (my history is shaky. Some of that may be wrong).
During the world stone-skipping championship on the island of Easdale off the west coast of Scotland, several competitors were found to have ground special rocks to make them skip better.
Oh. No. Is nothing sacred?
There were more than 2,000 competitors in this year's event and the rules were simple: The winner would be the person whose three tosses (each having to skip at least twice) covered the greatest distance. The stones thrown were required to come from "naturally occurring island slate."
Simple, right? If you've skipped stones at a river or lake (or stream or bathtub or ocean), you've undoubtedly looked for the perfect skipping stone. The best ones are medium-sized, flat and circular. At least I think those are the best ones because they seem like they would skip best.
The officials require the rocks to be no more than three inches across, so they have a wonderfully named "ring of truth," which they use to ensure the stones are no wider than that.
The officials said that the "ring of truth" was used to note the size, but no one noticed that many of the stones were almost perfectly round.
How many rocks are perfectly round? After some special grinding, enough, apparently.
Fortunately, the guilty admitted it. Or some of them did – we have to take the word of the event organizers, who have a built-in incentive to minimize reporting of cheating: Who knows how many stone-skippers were like Rafael Palmiero or Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens and didn't admit what was obvious?
We'll never know, but the winner of the event was an American named Jonathan Jennings, who won the event by skimming his three stones a cumulative 177 meters. That is roughly 580 feet, which is also the circumference of Barry Bonds' head after he "allegedly" used human growth hormone.
I jest. It was only about 400 feet around. No. Just kidding. Maybe 4 feet? It definitely was large.
Anyway, organizer Dr. Kyle Mathews told the BBC that lessons had been learned and they would "move on to an even greater event next year."
In other words, he was like the leader of every sport in which cheating is discovered: He vows that stone skipping will rise above the cheating.
I'm not sure I believe him. My faith in this sport is shaken, even though I didn't know it existed. Maybe next year, I'll skip it. Get it?
Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment