The Most Shocking Summer Olympic Wins of All Time

The Summer Olympics are one of sports’ biggest stages, representing the pinnacle of sporting glory for almost all competition types. Hence, they have acted as a theater of the unexpected, and below, we get into five surprising victories that have left their mark on sports history, ones that still get discussed, and which left the world in disbelief when they happened.

Rulon Gardner Beats Alexander Karelin

Alexander Karelin was a Greco-Roman wrestler who was active from 1986 to 2000, dominating his sport like no one before him. Nicknamed The Experiment, this Russian, born in 1967 in the largest city of the Siberian Federal District, Novosibirsk, began his wrestling training in 1981, at the age of fourteen, under Viktor Kuznetsov, the man who would coach him throughout his entire career. Karelin first started to box, hoping to follow in his father’s footsteps, and then moved to various other sports, such as basketball, swimming, skiing, and weightlifting, before eventually settling on Greco-Roman wrestling. He completed at super heavyweight throughout his active years and took home gold medals at the 1988, 1992, and 1996 Olympics.

In Sydney for the 2000 Summer Games, Karelin stepped onto the mats carrying a thirteen-year undefeated streak, not giving up a point in international competitions since 1994. In the Sydney final, Karelin faced Rulon Ellis Gardner, a wrestler out of Afton, Wyoming, who was the US champion in 1995 and 1997. According to the available data, the odds given for Rulon to take gold were two thousand to one at the time, as no one thought that anyone stood a shot of defeating Karelin, given that he ruled the mats so fiercely. However, something many people who have heard about this upset do not know is that it came after Karelin got penalized for an illegal hold. That essentially gave Gardner the win and ended the Russian’s legendary run.

Billy Mills Wins the 10,000 Meter Run

William Mervin Mills, better known as Billy Mills, was a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, born in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. He spent most of his childhood in this community’s Indian Reservation, among the Oglala Lakota people. Mills began running while attending university in Kansas (today’s Haskell Indian Nations University) while also boxing. Due to his talents, he got an athletic scholarship to the University of Kansans and established himself as a top NCAA cross-country runner.

Billy made the US Track and Field Team for the 1964 Summer Olympics as an unknown international runner, who came in second to Gerry Lindgren, who set many national records, at the US trials. The 10,000 1964 10,000-meter favorite was Australia’s Ron Clarke, who held the then-world-record for this distance. Experts believed the race would be a battle between Clarke and the Soviet Union’s Pyotr Bolotnikov. Yet, Mills stunned everyone, winning with a time of 28:24.4, as he passed Clarke and Mohammed Gammoudi of Tunisia at the end to take gold. We could not find any historical odds for his win, which is understandable because sports betting was not legal virtually anywhere in the 1960s.

After the Olympics, Mills proved his shocking upset was not a fluke by breaking the six-mile world record.

US Loses to Puerto Rico in Basketball

Yes, this did happen, and it occurred with the United States coming to the Athens Games with a star-studded squad. The US team featured players such as Allen Iverson, Dwayne Wade, Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James, Tim Duncan, Richard Jefferson, Shawn Marion, Stephon Marbury, and others. While granted, some top stars were missing from the roster. Still, everyone thought this set of players was more than enough to go all the way, especially given that they got coached by Larry Brown, who got assistance from Gregg Popovich. On top of this, the US came into this tournament after taking sixth place at the World Championship two years prior, and they appeared motivated to show the world that they were still the best at basketball.

However, in the first game of the competition, they stepped on a land mine in the form of unheralded Puerto Rico, which gave them their third loss in men’s Olympic basketball history. Puerto Rico won 92 to 73 in a lopsided win and shattered America’s confidence, which would go on to lose to Lithuania in the group stage and to Argentina in the semi-finals. Bookies gave them -1000 odds to beat Puerto Rico, but the contest turned out to be a historic moment for Puerto Rican basketball instead.

US Losses to the Soviet Union in Basketball

We mentioned that the Puerto Rico loss was the US’ third in Olympic history. Here is the story of the first, which occurred in 1972, when the Soviet team beat the US by one point in a contest mired in controversy. The US came into the Munich Games, winning seven gold medals in a row. Given the time period, we could not find any odds data on this game but would assume that if there were legal mainstream bookmakers back then, they would set them between -500 and -1000 for the US team winning.

The game ended in controversy because the last three seconds of the contest got replayed multiple times, and the US team thought the win got taken away from them. They refused to accept silver and filed a formal protest regarding the final outcome, which still gets debated to this day.

Japan Women’s Team Defeats the United States in Softball

Few people outside the US know what softball is, with many equating it to baseball. It is actually a descendant of the latter, featuring many similarities with that sport. But it boasts several key differences. For example, in softball, the balls are larger, the game gets played on a smaller diamond, and the pitches get thrown underhand. It became an Olympic sport in 1996 at the Atlanta Games, and twelve years later, the US women’s team was massively surprised in the gold medal game by a motivated Japan, who wound up winning the final with a score of three to one.

The US team had taken gold in the previous three Olympics and was riding a twenty-two-game winning streak in the games. There was no doubt in any expert’s mind that they had the best roster in the world, heavily favored (as high as -700) to snag another gold medal. Yet, right-hander Yukiko Ueno shut them down and ended the US’ dominance of battering opponents with outrageously lopsided scores, serving them a slice of humble pie.

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