Ricardo Oskam
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Rules are made to be broken. We're pretty sure a famous philosopher said that. Maybe it was Gandhi. Or Tupac. In any case, we live in a world based entirely on laws and regulations, so there's a whole hell of a lot of stuff out there to break. If you want to stand out in the crowded field of rule breaking, you're going to have to elevate your art. Like ...
Pigeon racing is a deadly serious competition, so of course there are pigeon doping scandals.
A study conducted in 2013 by the Pigeon Fanciers Association in Belgium (hard to make fun of somebody when that's the name they choose for themselves) found that several of the birds tested had traces of Mobistix, an off-the-shelf painkiller. And if pigeons hopped up on pills aren't hilarious enough, one of the birds even tested positive for goddamn cocaine.
The sport has apparently had a culture of doping for decades, and the code of silence is serious. Whistleblowers decline to have their names published, for fear of retribution. That's right ... wait for it ... waaaiiit for iiiiit ...
They don't tolerate no stool pigeons.
You know there's a doping problem in cycling. Even if you don't follow the sport, there was a pretty big media storm a while back about that Armstrong guy, who took human growth hormone and grew to enormous proportions, literally stomping his competition to death. Probably. We may have skimmed those stories a bit.
Actually, the reality of doping in cycling is almost as bizarre. One team found the hero it needed in Willy Voet. Voet was the "masseur" for team Festina in the Tour de France, but his massage skills weren't what made him so popular. Nobody can give you a massage so good that you win gold at the Tour de France. His more popular service was supplying his athletes with chemicals -- everything from caffeine to steroids to meth -- and coming up with creative ways to sneak them past the drug testers.
One trick was to fill a condom with clean urine, attach a tube to the condom, and camouflage the tube by gluing pubic hairs to it (eew?). After the race, when it was time to submit to drug testing, the cyclists would simply shove the condom right up their ass to make it nice and warm, and glue the tube into their full, untrimmed, 1980s bush. They could then deposit a sample of clean, drug-free pee, even while someone was watching. Other solutions involved flasks of other people's urine hidden in the armpits and various other body cavities. In one case, a cyclist's wife pretended to faint in order to distract the doctor while the cheater switched pee vials.
When regulators got wise to these tricks, they started searching for hidden devices. Surely, you think, when you're buck naked, and you've already had a guy's hand up your ass, and they're watching your dick with a magnifying glass while you piss into a jar, there are no options left for you. Well, you just lack imagination. Cyclists began actually pumping other people's urine into their own bladders through a catheter, essentially allowing someone else to pee inside of them. You have to wonder if they don't just deserve to win, if that's how much they're willing to suffer for it.
Of all the board games, chess is the only one taken seriously as a "sport." The world championships for Battleship, or Connect Four, don't get nearly as much international news coverage. Given its level of prestige, it probably shouldn't be surprising that people go to great lengths to cheat at it. In 2015, Georgian Grandmaster Gaioz Nigalidze made frequent visits to the restrooms right before crucial moves. A search of the toilet revealed a smartphone and a headset, hidden behind the pan, and covered with toilet paper. Nigalidze denied that it belonged to him, but the tournament arbiters thought it was awfully suspicious that the phone was logged in to a chess-playing robot under his name, so they disqualified him.
In a 2015 tournament, 19-year-old Dhruv Kakkar beat several much higher-rated chess masters by using a contraption that would make Q proud. After one opponent became suspicious, Kakkar was frisked, revealing an elaborate setup involving two phones -- one taped to each ankle -- a speaker hidden in his ear, and spare batteries stuffed in his underwear.
He'd been tapping his feet in code to transmit details of his opponents' moves to a friend, who was using a computer to relay moves back to Kakkar via his earpiece.
Arcangelo Ricciardi also raised suspicion when he started wiping the floor with much higher-rated opponents in 2015. Referees thought it was bizarre that he kept one hand stuffed in his armpit the entire time, and was blinking oddly (though how do you qualify strange behavior among career chess players, really?). An inspection found that he was wearing a hidden camera, and some outside participant was transmitting moves to him via Morse code to a device tucked in his armpit. There's a common theme, here: Never trust the armpit.
Porn is something almost everyone uses, but nobody pays for. So media producers will occasionally try to recoup their income by going after porn pirates in court. Between 2011 and 2014, a couple of lawyers decided to skip the middle man and just produce a bunch of porn themselves, put it on the internet, and sue anyone who downloaded it.
In the beginning, the scam run by attorneys John L. Steele and Paul R. Hansmeier involved buying up a lot of copyrights to porn movies, and putting those movies on file-sharing websites. They would then wait for someone to download the movies like a couple of litigious Wile E. Coyotes. Once that happened, they would subpoena service providers to give them the details of the downloaders, and threaten them for settlements.
Eventually, the easy money scheme grew: Steele and Hansmeier actually started shooting their own porn movies, with no intention to sell them, just to give them clickbait titles, put them on Pirate Bay, and wait for that sweet litigation money to roll in.
Fortunately, when we set up our legal system, we foresaw these kinds of shenanigans and decided to make rules against them, inventing words like "entrapment" and "extortion." Though piracy is still illegal, it's also illegal to bait people into doing it for your own profit. Being lawyers, Steele and Hansmeier were aware of this, which is why they hid their activities behind a bunch of pseudonyms and shell companies. In the end, they made around $6 million from the scam, but Steele, the mastermind, was eventually caught after falling like so many do: by incriminating himself on Twitter.
In the state of Bihar, India, cheating on school tests has become the world's most elaborate game of "the floor is lava."
Every year, exams in Bihar become a life-or-death affair, when parents literally scale the sides of school buildings in order to pass notes through the windows. Although this kind of thing is all technically against the law, local police just think of it as payday, since the bribes are so rampant. It's rare that anyone is actually charged for this behavior, and any attempts at cracking down on the situation have resulted in minor riots.
The Bihar Education Minister best characterized the whole situation: "What can the government do to stop cheating, if parents and relatives are not ready to cooperate? Should the government give orders to shoot them?"
We hope that's just a rhetorical question.
In April of 2017, India passed a law stating that no business could serve alcohol within 500 meters of a highway. As you would imagine, an awful lot of bars, pubs, and liquor stores instantly went out of business. One bar, however, survived on a loophole -- the law specifies walking distance, not direct distance.
The owners of Aishwarya Bar shipped in a ton of wooden panels and built themselves an elaborate entryway that is, in effect, a half-mile-long maze. Since you now need to walk further than 500 meters from the road to enter the premises, the bar is still operating within the specified regulations.
According to the authorities, who no doubt quadruple-checked the legislation to make super-sure you could slip around a law with zany shenanigans, the whole situation is legal, though they do intend to fine the bar owners for "altering the entrance." Otherwise known as the "whatever, f**k you" compromise.
Aishwarya Bar will be allowed to continue to operate where it stands, although there's a natural catch -- after weaving your way in there and drinking half your weight in alcohol, you have to find your way back out again. Good luck!
For more ridiculous moments of breaking the rules, check out and The 5 Biggest Cheaters in Game Show History.
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