Robert Milkins
Alcohol, sportspeople and common sense are rarely seen together, and it’s been another year full of salutary stories. Take, for example, the South Korean three-time Olympic medal-winning speed skater Kim Min-seok, who in August gave three fellow skaters a lift home from a friend’s birthday party at the national training centre near Seoul, drove straight into a crash barrier and earned an 18-month ban from the sport (two of his passengers were banned for six months for abetting drink driving and a coach who wasn’t even there got a year for “lack of oversight”; Kim never got as far as a public road and thus avoided criminal prosecution). But the year’s most humiliating booze-related sporting incident came in Antalya in March, when the English snooker player Robert Milkins turned up for the opening ceremony of the Turkish Masters having already enthusiastically celebrated his birthday, drunkenly confronted a senior official, injured himself falling over in the toilets and ended up having his stomach pumped in hospital. “I genuinely don’t know exactly what happened, I was in a state where I didn’t know where I was,” he said. “When I got to the toilet I lost my legs and think I hit my chin on the sink or the ground, cutting it open. I was almost knocked out, and I’m pretty sure I have broken ribs. If I had my stomach pumped I don’t remember that either.” The bump on the head can’t have damaged him too badly – after 27 years as a professional in which he had never got his hands on a trophy, he won his next tournament – the Gibraltar Open.
Draymond Green
There are apologies and there are apologies, and basketball player Draymond Green was truly in a sorry state in October after video emerged of him landing a proper full-on right hook on his Golden State Warriors teammate Jordan Poole in practice. “I failed as a man,” said the longtime controversy-magnet. “I am a very flawed human being.” Green has repeatedly proved as much, his previous greatest hits including being suspended for a crucial game of the 2016 NBA finals after whacking LeBron James in the groin, accidentally posting a picture of his own very much unclothed groin on Snapchat (he said it was “intended to be a private message” and that “we’re all one click away from placing something in the wrong place”) and another suspension for arguing with another teammate, Kevin Durant. None of this seems to have particularly damaged his self-esteem. “I’m the best defender to ever play this game,” he says. “100%.” Also hitting someone he shouldn’t have this year: Indian wrestler Satender Malik, who punched a referee after losing the under-125kg final at his country’s Commonwealth Games qualifiers, and was duly banned for life. A few weeks later he was banned for another four years, if such a thing is possible, having allegedly “run away from the venue without informing anyone” after being summoned for a dope test.
Elton Jantjies
It’s been a memorable year for 42-times capped South African rugby union international Elton Jantjies. In May he returned alone from a family holiday to Turkey, a journey so unusual that upon arrival in Johannesburg he was immediately arrested for “malicious damage to property”. Apparently he had broken a glass and damaged the screen and the light at his business class seat, while a passenger in economy claimed of seeing him totter to a toilet – “he struggled to keep his balance” – and bang on the door so hard his knuckles bled, all the while beseeching the air hostess, who had locked herself inside for her own protection to “komaan, my skat”, Afrikaans for “come on, my darling”. By the time he gave up there was “blood all over the toilet door”. In September he was sent home from a tour of Argentina after reports emerged of him leaving the team hotel and checking into a different one with the team’s dietician, Zeenat Simjee. He admitted the affair, while Simjee’s lawyer insisted he had been not with her but with another woman. She went with the team on their winter trip to Europe but Jantjies stayed in South Africa and moved into a rehab facility for a ‘“mental break” and to “treat his insomnia”. “As a fly-half, I believe to be playing Test rugby I need to be sleeping perfectly,” he said.
Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky
It has been an epic year for cheating controversies and conspiracies, a year in which the concept of vibrating anal beads in chess, for better or worse, leaped irreversibly into the public consciousness. But who, from this crowded field, deserves a place in the Anti-Spoty spotlight? Step forward Runyan and Cominsky, and the moment the successful fishing duo were knocked off their perch – and also their pike, their bass and their catfish. It was not the first time the pair’s integrity had been questioned – after they won the Fall Brawl on Lake Erie last year Cominsky failed a mandatory polygraph test, meaning they were denied the first prize of a $125,000 boat (happily they passed the tests for another competition they won that same weekend, sailing home with a $152,000 boat). Back then Runyan said the pair were “pursuing legal recourse”, adding that he was “pretty good at picking out where there’s shady stuff going on”. Sadly for him so was Jason Fischer, director of this year’s Lake Erie Walleye Trail, who in September grew suspicious about the impressive weight of the less impressively sized fish Runyan and Cominsky had landed, sliced one open and started pulling out lead weights. Instead of netting them a prize of $28,760 they found themselves in hot water for a change, charged with one count apiece of cheating, attempted grand theft, possessing criminal tools and unlawful ownership of wild animals. They also inspired major fishing competitions to start investing in metal detectors. The pair pleaded not guilty to the charges. “This has been terrible for fishing as a sport,” said Ron Taylor, a semi-pro bass fisherman. “It’s been hard on the people who are playing by the rules and I think for people who just like to hear about catching big fish.”
Sander van Ginkel
It was a Winter Olympics year, which is basically a guarantee of controversy, and Van Ginkel took the gold medal in a hotly competed field, pipping the mixed team ski jumping jumpsuit-based disqualification madness. Van Ginkel was the sports scientist employed by the Dutch speed skating team who mounted a strategic influencing campaign on Beijing’s Canadian icemaster, Mark Messer, in an attempt to force him into making ice that would suit his nation’s skaters. Far from hiding his involvement, he happily gave interviews about it. “The colder the ice, the harder it gets,” he explained. “Many other countries produce skaters who have more of a shorter stroke and for whom hard ice is less important. I try to create the best possible conditions for our skaters, and I hope to convince Messer and his people of my ideas. I think he and his staff are genuinely interested in what I have to say.” This did not go down well with rival skaters. “This is far from fair play, this is corruption,” said Sweden’s Nils van der Poel. “This is the biggest scandal in our sport. We’ve had doping cases but I don’t see this as being less serious. They have a guy whose job is to put pressure on the ice maker to change the ice for the benefit of the Netherlands. However the best ice for me is when the ice is bad. I’m quite good when the ice is bad.” The Dutch won six of 14 gold medals in the sport, massively dominating the medals table, but the ice can’t have been that great: Van der Poel won two golds of his own.
Anti-Spoty special award for gaslighting
The state of Qatar, for hosting, in the middle of the World Cup, the 2022 Anti-Corruption Excellence Awards or, to give them their official title after they were named in honour of the nation’s emir, the Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani International Excellence Awards. For the first time this year an award was given specifically for a leader of the fight against corruption in sport; among the guests for the ceremony, Corruption’s Fifa’s own Gianni Infantino.
Anti-Spoty quote of the year
“That stomach, those abs, those pictures you send so I can keep tabs / You make me feel funny down there. Especially when you’re there and you look up and stare / I’m gonna end by saying you are my love, my friend, my soul / And most of all you believe in me which makes me as hard as a totem pole.” – Ryan Giggs’s romantic poetry, as read out in court during his trial for displaying controlling or coercive behaviour towards the poem’s subject, Kate Greville. The jurors were unable to reach a verdict and a retrial has been scheduled for next summer.
