Aug 22, 2008, 6:06 GMT
Beijing - This day in Olympic history: August 23
2004 - Hungarian Robert Fazekas wins the hammer throw with a distance of 70.93. After failing to produce enough urine to be tested, he was disqualified and later a bag of stored urine was found on his body. Luckily for the runner-up and world champion Virgilijus Alekna, Fazekas' cheating was discovered early enough to allow the Lithuanian to participate in the victory ceremony.
2004 - Meseret Defar wins the women's 5,000m from Kenyan Isabella Ochichi and Defar's Ethiopian team-mate Tirunesh Dibaba, who a year earlier, had become the youngest-ever 5,000m world champion. With 200m remaining only Defar and Ochichi were in contention and the Ethiopian managed to surge past the Kenyan to take the gold.
1920 - Paavo Nurmi wins the men's individual cross country and team cross country event at the Antwerp Olympics. It is his second and third gold medal. He goes on to win six more (five in 1924 and 1 in 1928) for a total of nine gold medals, which made him the most successful Olympian (tied with three others) till the Beijing Olympics, when American swimmer Michael Phelps moved to 14 gold medals. Nurmi also won three silver medals.
During the 1924 Olympics in Paris, Nurmi won the 1,500m and 5,000m within 26 minutes of each other, setting a world record in both. Finnish officials, fearing for his health, refused to enter him in the 10,000m, thus not allowing him the opportunity to defend his title from 1920. Furiously, he ran a world record that was to last for 12 years in his next race.
1911 - Elizabeth Robinson is born. Also known as Betty, Robinson became the first-ever women's 100m Olympic sprint champion when she won the inaugural competition as a 16-year-old in 1928 at the Amsterdam Olympics. It was only her third 100m competition. She also won a silver medal in the 4x100m relay.
Three years later she was seriously injured in a plane crash and the man who found her put her in his car boot, thinking she was dead and drove her to an undertaker. It was only there that it was discovered that she was still alive, but in a coma. She awoke from her coma seven months after the accident and then had to spend six months in a wheel chair. She missed the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics as a result and could no longer participate in individual sprint races as she could not kneel. She was a member of the 1936 US relay team that beat the favoured Germans at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
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