A short timeline of sporting villainy

Thanks to his antics in the Alps, Alberto Contador has joined a time-honoured list; not of great champions but of great sporting villains.

1919 – Chicago White Sox throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds after being paid off by gamblers. Baseball takes years to recover and Shoeless Joe Jackson goes down in the annals of sporting infamy. He dies a broken man in 1951.

1930/31 – Originally devised as a means of curtailing the genius of Don Bradman, 'leg theory' is applied to the entire Australian team in the 1930/31 Ashes series, possibly the most infamous sporting contest of all time. Bodyline changes everything: relations between the countries almost break down; cricket's rules are re-written; and England captain Douglas Jardine enters folklore as one of the most despised (and admired) tacticians in the history of sport.

1968 – Basil D'Oliveira, a 'coloured' South African playing cricket for England, is left out of the squad to tour South Africa to placate the nation's apartheid regime. The incident kick starts the sporting boycott of South Africa.

1971 – The British Lions tour of New Zealand was going well – a little too well according to the locals who, fearful that the Lions would fix up the mighty All Blacks in the forthcoming Tests, decided to take some action. The tour match against Canterbury was nothing short of calculated thuggery. Three Lions were so severely injured their tours were cancelled. It didn't help the Kiwis, who lost the series anyway.

1976 – Soviet pentathlete Boris Onischenko was doing very well in the fencing leg of his event at the Montreal Olympics ... a little too well, in fact. Subsequent inquiries discovered Onischenko's equipment had been rigged to register scores when none were legally due. Hello salt mines.

1981 – New Zealand requires six runs from the final ball of a ODI to tie the match against Australia. Skipper Greg Chappell gets his head together with brother Trevor, resulting in a gently rolled underarm delivery that would have made Francis Drake proud. As a country, New Zealand get over the incident easily and quickly.

1988 – Ben Johnson blasts rival Carl Lewis off the track in the final of the 1988 100 metres in world record time. Days later he is stripped of the medal after testing positive to the steroid stanozolol. Athletics, and sport, is changed forever.

1994 – The aptly named Jeff Gillooly whacks Nancy Kerrigan on the knee with a club at the behest of his wife Tonya Harding. Harding, a rival of Kerrigan on the US ice-skating team, nevertheless competes in the 1994 Winter Olympics. She finishes eighth, Kerrigan finishes with a silver medal.

1997 – Mike Tyson meets Evander Holyfield in a much-anticipated heavyweight world title bout in Las Vegas. But the fight is just the entree, the main course is Holyfield's ear, which is bitten off by Tyson in the third round.

2000 – Indian police reveal details of a recording implicating South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje in match fixing. One of Cronje's co-accused, Hershelle Gibbs, comes clean forcing Cronje into his own admission. Cronje dies in 2002 when the light aeroplane he is in crashes in the Outeniqua mountains.

2000 – Spain's men's Paralympic intellectual disability basketball team wins the gold medal at the Sydney Paralympics only for one of the players, a undercover journalist, to later reveal that the majority of the team suffered from no disabilities whatsoever. The gold medals were handed back amid furore in Spain over the cynical, deliberate plot to recruit able-bodied athletes to play in the team.

2009 – Thierry Henry displays hand skills Renoir would be proud of in setting up the goal that sends France through to the World Cup finals over Ireland. The team subsequently falls apart in South Africa, failing to win a game and flying home in the shame of economy class.

2010 – Defending Tour de France champion Alberto Contador breaks cycling's gentlemen's agreement of not exploiting mechanical failure by zooming past rival Andy Schleck when his chain breaks during a climb in the 15th stage. Contador apologises on YouTube but does not hand back the yellow jersey.