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LONDON - Losing at the Olympics hurts. But suffering an injustice, real or imagined, is agony.

The 2012 Games have been peppered with debatable refereeing,
a technical glitch in fencing, post-race relegation and – this
one a first – the controversial expulsion of eight badminton
players judged to have broken the spirit, but not the rules, of
their sport.

Throw in an embarrassing mix-up over national flags and a
fair measure of crowd-power, and London has provided its share
of memorable moments where passion has spilled into protest and
petulance, frustration and fury.

Early frontrunners for drama gold include South Korea’s Shin
A-lam, who sat on the fencing piste, weeping, for an hour in
protest at her elimination from the epee semi-final.

She is up against the North Korean women’s soccer team, who
refused to take the field in the city of Glasgow for a match
against Colombia because a giant video screen mistakenly showed
the flag of their country’s sworn enemy South Korea.

While Iranian boxer Ali Mazaheri stormed out of the ring
after being disqualified, home cyclist Victoria Pendleton simply
held her head in disbelief after being disqualified in an event
where she could have won gold, then fought back tears in an
interview.

“Many athletes have worked with their support teams on
possible outcomes,” said Andrew Lane, professor of sports
psychology at the University of Wolverhampton in England, “but
these unusual decisions you just can’t cater for.”

HISTORIC HISTRIONICS

For all the theatrics, London still has some way to go to
match previous Olympics.

In Seoul in 1988, South Korean boxer Jung-Il Byun refused to
leave the ring for 67 minutes after losing a fight and was left
in darkness after organisers decided to switch off the lights.

The all-time Olympic tantrum champion, however, may well be
the Cuban taekwondo fighter Angel Valodia Matos, who, after
disqualification for taking too much time out with an injury at
Beijing 2008, kicked out at the referee’s face.

He was banned from the sport for life.

Some of the more emotional scenes in London have been
grounded in reasonable grievances.

Shin, the fencer from South Korea, thought she had triumphed
over Germany’s Britta Heidemann, only to see a single second put
back on the clock during which she was hit, and eliminated.

To walk off the piste would have been to accept the decision
and her long, lonely wait, during which she was at times calm
and at others in tears, was for the outcome of an appeal.

Yet photographs of a distraught athlete, slumped and
spot-lit against the dark backdrop of the venue, were among the
most striking of the first week of the Games.

Two days before the opening ceremony, an angry North Korean
women’s soccer team stormed off the pitch after the flag
faux-pas and remained in their changing room, delaying kick-off
by more than an hour.

“Bad Korea move” was the Sun tabloid’s tongue-in-cheek
headline, though the fault in confusing two countries that are
technically at war was clearly that of the organisers.

Boxer Mazaheri’s protest was shorter but more explosive.

On learning that he had been disqualified for persistent
holding against Cuban Jose Larduet Gomez, the heavyweight left
the ring before the referee held his opponent’s hand aloft.

“It was a fix,” the Iranian growled. “It was a set-up.”

The International Amateur Boxing Association defended the
disqualification, although other London boxing results have been
vociferously disputed, and a Turkmen referee was thrown out of
the Games for bad refereeing.

BOXER IN TEARS

Also in boxing, Angola’s team chief Antonio Monteiro railed
against his country’s boxing coach for failing to get their only
fighter, heavyweight Tumba Silva, to the weigh-in, meaning
automatic disqualification.

“The athlete was inconsolable,” said Monteiro, “he cried
like a child.”

Crowds have played a big part in London’s passion plays.

London’s ExCel Centre erupted in boos of derision when South
Korea’s Cho Jun-ho was judged to have beaten Japan’s Masashi
Ebinuma after a close judo encounter.

Startled judges referred their decision to a reviewing jury,
which took the unprecedented step of overturning the result.

Perhaps fellow Olympians could learn from the ultimately
defeated Cho.

Despite looking perplexed at the bizarre turn of events, he
left the mat without dissent and refused to criticise referees.

“I thought I had won,” he said. “We both won bronze medals
so I’m very happy.”

The crowd also jeered and booed loudly at Wembley Arena
during two women’s badminton matches when pairs from China,
Indonesia and South Korea deliberately tried to lose to secure
an easier draw in the subsequent knockout rounds.

The embarrassing scenes quickly attracted the attention of
officials and media, and led to the expulsion of the eight
players involved.

One of them, Yu Yang of China, pointed out to the sport’s
administrators that she was playing within the rules and said
she would quit the sport.

“You have heartlessly shattered our dreams,” she wrote on
her Tencent microblog. “This is my last competition. Goodbye
Badminton World Federation, goodbye my beloved badminton.”