dilluns, 12 de desembre del 2011

Student B: Sports: if you really want to win, cheat

Vocabulary: Learn English

In which sports are there most cases of cheating? How do people cheat in these sports?


Tell your partner about famous cheatings in sport:


 4. Stella Walsh had a pretty ingenious sports hack: ambiguous genitalia! Walsh was an Olympic competitor for Poland, winning the gold in the 100m sprint in 1932, and the silver in 1936. Walsh set 18 world records in her life, but accusations that she was male dogged her for years, and she was forced to undergo a gender check at the 1936 Olympics. Which she apparently passed, despite the fact that when she was autopsied following her death it was found that she had male genitalia, along with female characteristics. Further investigation revealed that she had both an XX and an XY pair of chromosomes  


5. Easily one of the most famous plays in sports history, Diego Maradona’s goal came six minutes into the second half of the 1986 World Cup quarter-final between England and Argentina. Maradona punched the ball into the goal with his left hand, and referee Ali Bin Nasser allowed it, not having seen the penalty.  


6.The East Germans became a sporting powerhouse in the 1970s and '80s, rivalling the much larger United States and Soviet Union. Thousands of East German athletes were given performance-enhancing steroids in an effort to prove East German superiority over the West. Many thought they were simply taking vitamins.




7. On April. 21, 1980, the 23-year-old Ruiz was the first woman to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon. She did it in the third-fastest time ever recorded for a female runner (two hours, 31 minutes, 56 seconds). Eventually a few spectators came forward and said they saw Ruiz join the race during its final half-mile. It seems that she had sprinted to the finish line. 


Watch this video and write down different kinds of cheating in sport.

dilluns, 5 de desembre del 2011

Student A: Sports: if you really want to win, cheat

Vocabulary: Learn English

 In which sports are there most cases of cheating? How do people cheat in these sports?

Tell your partner about famous cheatings in sport:


1. At the 2000 Summer Paralympics in Sydney, Spain was stripped of its gold medal in intellectual disability basketball after it was discovered that 10 of the 12 competitors for the winning team were not disabled. The athletes had not been given the required mental tests and The Spanish Federation for Mentally Handicapped Sports had deliberately chosen to sign up athletes who were not intellectually disabled in order to “win medals and gain more sponsorship.”  


2. Dora Ratjen was a German athlete who competed in the 1936 Olympics in the High Jump. Not much of a story really, except for one thing: Dora was actually Hermann, a man who was coerced by the Hitler Youth into tightly binding his genitals and competing against women. The German Olympic team struggled in the previous Olympic games, and so it was thought entering a man here and there on the women’s side of things might remedy the situation. But German men couldn’t even beat the women of other countries, as Ratjen finished fourth, failing to medal.  

3. Steroids are much in the news of late, with Major League Baseball facing a juicing crisis, but you have to go back more than twenty years to a time when steroids really first went mainstream. The Olympics have a long history of athletes using anything they can get their hands on, but it all came to a head in the 80′s with Ben Johnson being stripped of his gold medal that he won in the 100m sprint.