In September 2025, a bombshell report by sportswriter Pablo Torre supposed that the Los Angeles Clippers had enticed then-Toronto Raptor Kawhi Leonard to the team by promising him payment outside of the $103 million he would make from his contract. Some of these incentives included a $28 million no-show endorsement deal with Aspiration, a tree-planting company that Clippers owner Steve Ballmer had previously invested $50 million into. Torre published further reports throughout 2026 accusing Daktronics, a scoreboard manufacturer, of being a middleman to covertly pay Leonard money supplied by the Clippers in the form of sponsorships. As a result, the Clippers were investigated by the NBA, which found that the team was in violation of league rules by circumventing the salary cap. 

The idea that Clippers bookkeepers would be able to get away with millions in mysterious expenditures is problematic, but their alibi being tree-planting and the scoreboard mafia is even worse. League commissioner Adam Silver threw the book at the Clippers, a punishment that included fines, suspensions and having five of their first-round picks stripped from them. This isn’t the first time the Clippers have faced scrutiny either. Former owner Donald Sterling was exposed for asking his part-black mistress to “not bring [black people] to my games.” The Clippers wore their shirts inside-out before the game as a protest, and combined with outrage from every corner of the league, Silver banned Sterling from all NBA-sanctioned events for life. The team was subsequently sold to Steve Ballmer, one of the individuals implicated in the Clippers’ most recent scandal.

The main takeaway from this newest Clippers scandal is how crippling the punishment is, but less emphasis is being placed on how bizarre the scheme was in the first place. To find out exactly how bizarre the scheme was, I began my quest to find the most ridiculous incidents of match-fixing, illegal play and sabotage in sporting history. The term “ridiculous” in this case will be applied in terms of how unique, blatant or unbelievable the attempt at cheating was, focusing most on the details of the scandal.

The use of performance-enhancing drugs is probably the marquee example of cheating in sports, with many of the highest profile sports scandals revolving around doping. To my surprise, PED use is present even in competitions where physical athleticism isn’t required to be great. For example, the card game bridge has an International Sports Federation recognized by the International Olympic Committee, which requires all of its athletes in its federations to undergo testing for performance-enhancing drugs. This includes bridge, a game in which there is no advantage to be gained from the effects of the drugs the committee tests for. Still, Icelandic player Disa Eythorsdottir was stripped of her silver medal at the 2002 World Championships for refusing a mandatory drug test. While she claimed that she was on prescription medication for dieting and back pain, she was unable to produce the prescriptions when asked.

Performance-enhancing drugs have become so heavily associated with cheating in athletics that illegal modifications to equipment are now generally referred to as “mechanical doping.” A recent instance of this came during the 2025 Nordic World Ski Championships when members of the Norwegian team were found to have extra fabric and stitching around the crotches of their ski suits, which was suspected to have been added to make the skiers catch more wind and fly farther on their jumps. The accusations were found to be accurate, and three members of the team’s equipment staff were handed 18-month suspensions. To prevent further instances of tampering, suits are microchipped and 3D scans of athletes wearing their suits are taken to ensure no excess fabric is being added prior to jumps.

Baseball also has a storied lineage of rule-bending and could take up the entirety of this list given how well-documented some of the cases are. One of the funnier Major League incidents was when then-Minnesota Twins pitcher Joe Niekro was suspected of doctoring baseballs to give them extra grip in 1987. When the umpires told him to turn his pockets inside-out to look for anything he could be using to scuff up the balls, Niekro tried to covertly toss a nail file and piece of sandpaper he was keeping in his pocket. Instead, he flung the items in direct view of umpire Tim Tschida, who immediately ejected him from the game. 

A more comical instance was when Minor League catcher Dave Bresnahan hatched a plan for a new kind of hidden-ball trick to get a runner on third out on a play at the plate. He would try to pick off a runner on third with something that wasn’t actually the baseball, then tag the runner out with the real ball when they tried to score. He checked with an umpire friend of his named Tim Tschida — the same Tim Tschida who Joe Niekro tried to sneak a nail file by just a month before — who said they’d probably just do over the play, or at worst, be ejected. He got his teammates in on the play and snuck his decoy of choice, a potato, onto the field, inside a replacement catcher’s mitt. The play went exactly as planned, but the umpire allowed the run in. Bresnahan’s Williamsport Bills eventually won the game, but the catcher was fined $50 by the team and released.

As wild as some of these are, the most incomprehensible cases of cheating I could find involved, of all things, pigeon racing. The sport involves releasing trained birds a set distance away from their ‘home’, and the first pigeons to make it back to their owners are the winners. As it turns out, there is an absurd amount of money in pigeon racing, so much so that multiple birds have been sold for over 1 million dollars. With the amount of cash flowing through the sport, pigeon owners will do quite a bit to make sure their birds are the earliest. Predation is a major risk to racing pigeons, which has led owners of expensive birds to hunt animals that prey on pigeons along the paths of upcoming races. It’s also not uncommon for birds to be stolen by the ‘pigeon mafia’ and sold to breeders for a profit. Earlier this year, police raids on several homes in Romania located 165 missing racing pigeons and landed the mastermind of the operation in jail for 30 months.

Among all of the many controversies and scandals in pigeon racing that could easily be the weirdest in the history of sports, I believe one incident from 2013 rules the roost. Five Belgian pigeons were given drug tests, in which all five tested positive for traces of cocaine. No arrests related to this incident were made, but drug testing for pigeons became commonplace in the years following. This begs several questions: How does one get a pigeon to do cocaine? Are there cases of pigeons overdosing on cocaine? How can these pigeons find cocaine at all? Regardless, I think this case is exactly what I was looking for when I began this search. It involves a party taking an enormous risk for a reward that may or may not come. It creates a scenario that, even to the best of my abilities, I cannot begin to understand. Every answer I found about the sport of pigeon racing as a whole begged 100 even weirder questions. Congratulations to these Belgian pigeons on their victory. I’d recommend bringing NARCAN to the celebrations.