Sports cheats from Dean Richards to Maradona

Dean Richards, the former England rugby union forward turned coach, has been banned from the game for three years for arranging for his Harlequins players to feign injuries with fake blood. This allowed 'blood replacements' to come on to the field at crucial moments.

His plan was discovered when winger Tom Williams (above) was caught fabricating injury in a Heineken Cup quarter-final against Leinster in April.

Here The First Post takes a look at some of sports most ingenious cheats.
 
Neil BackIn the dying moments of the 2002 Heineken Cup Final, Leicester Tigers were defending a Munster scrum in front of their posts. Leading 15-9 and knowing that the Irish team would win if they scored a converted try, Neil Back, England's pugnacious flanker, scooped the ball out of the opposing scrum-half's hands and into the Leicester side of the scrum. They cleared to touch, and a second successive Heineken victory was theirs. Back was unrepentant. "That was a very crucial scrum, and I did what I had to do to ensure a win for Leicester. I am not a cheat and I would be very upset if anyone accused me of being one", he said.

Spanish Paralympic Basketball team

There used to be a competition for basketball players with learning disabilities at the Paralympics. That was until, at the Sydney games in 2000, the Spanish gold-medal winning team was rumbled by an investigative journalist for fielding a team in which 10 (out of 12) players had no learning disabilities at all.  Subsequently, after deciding that it was too hard to judge contestants' intelligence, the Paralympics had to stop all competitions for athletes with learning disabilities.

Sonny Liston

After Mohammed Ali had carried out a relentless campaign of intimidation in the pre-fight build-up - even turning up at a casino where Liston was playing and baiting him for losing – Sonny Liston was struggling at the end of the third round of their World Championship bout in 1964. Desperate, he reportedly instructed his corner to "burn his gloves", by putting some of the ointment used to stop cuts from bleeding on them. By the end of the next round, Ali was complaining that he'd been blinded, and wanted to retire. Fortunately for him, his coaching team wouldn't allow him to stop, and Ali eventually won in the seventh.

Boris Onishchenko

Going into the fencing, the second event in the Modern Pentathlon at the 1976 Olympics, the Soviet Union team was languishing in fourth place. Fighting against British athlete Jim Fox, Boris Onishchenko won a point on the electronic scoring system when the buzzer sounded despite his thrust missing Fox by a foot. What had happened was that Onishchenko had tampered with the circuit system attached to his sword, enabling him to award himself points whenever he pleased. After this was found out, the Soviets were  disqualified and the British won gold, but only after Onishchenko, his dodgy sword confiscated, had demolished Fox in a legal fight.   

Donald Crowhurst

After Francis Chichester became the first man to sail single-handedly around the world, the Sunday Times arranged a race to see who could circumnavigate the globe without stopping. For Donald Crowhurst, a struggling businessman, this presented a perfect chance to win the generous prize money and transform his fortunes. But Crowhurst, who had made his own, untested trimaran boat, the Teignmouth Electron, for the voyage, soon found himself lagging behind and facing up to the ignominy of returning home in failure. So instead, he lingered alone in the South Atlantic, and made up an elaborate series of log entries, in the hope of quietly finishing last. The problem was that, unintentionally, these false ocean positions put him in the race lead. Faced with the prospect of his hoax being discovered, with his sanity deteriorating as he sat along on his yacht, Crowhurst, everyone assumes, committed suicide by jumping into the sea.

Marathon cheats

Long-distance events provide ample opportunity for cheating. The winner of the marathon at the 1904 Olympics in St Louis, Fred Lorz, was found to have travelled almost half of the course in a car. Then there was the ruse tried by South African brothers Sergio and Fika Motsoeneng. Competing in the Comrades Marathon, a 90 kilometre slog between Pietermaritzburg in the Drakensberg Mountains and Durban on the coast in 1999, the brothers, who looked almost identical, took turns running the race, ducking into a mobile toilet to change their shoes, which had microchips attached to them. The brothers were detected after they were pictured wearing their watches on different wrists, and one of them had grazed shins.

Diego Maradona

Sport's most famous piece of rule-breaking came in the quarter-final of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, at a time when Argentina still harbored resentments over their defeat in the Falklands War. Maradona, the star of the tournament, set off on a mazy run, beat three English players, made a pass and ran into the box. When a misplaced clearance by midfielder Steve Hodge ballooned into the air, Maradona, all 5ft 4in of him, somehow beat goalkeeper Peter Shilton to the ball - but only by punching it into an empty net. As the English protested, Maradona told his teammates to hug him, else the referee wouldn't give the goal. Four minutes later, Maradona scored what is widely thought of as football's greatest ever goal, and Argentina were on their way to winning the competition. He told a press conference that his first goal had been scored "a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God." ·