Sabbir Rahman

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Rahman has managed to squeeze a single Test, eight ODI appearances and the same number of T20s into a year in which there have been only two months when the Bangladeshi batsman was not suspended from any form of cricket. On New Year’s Day he picked up a six-month suspension from the domestic game, was stripped of his central contract and fined $25,000 for, during a first-class game in the last week of 2017, asking the on-field umpires’ permission to briefly leave the field and, having secured it, assaulting a 12-year-old boy who had apparently “made a noise” at him, while hiding behind a sightscreen (though not from an eagle-eyed official). “We have meted out a heavy punishment,” said the BCB disciplinary committee vice-chairman, Sheikh Sohel. “This is his last chance. If he has another brush with indiscipline, he will be permanently suspended.” This was not exactly true. In the summer Rahman’s Facebook account threatened to physically assault a fan who criticised his form, after that other brush with indiscipline had come to pass. After promising that he “would never do such a thing again” and also “admitting to a lot of things” he was fined and suspended afresh, this time from domestic cricket. “He said his account was hacked but we took into account other incidents, some of which he has admitted to be true,” said the BCB director, Ismail Haider Mallick, so the player had at least displayed some of the elite honesty that many in cricket aspire to. “If there is a repeat, he will be serving longer suspensions. Some people get their act straight, some don’t.”

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Jan Blokhuijsen, Sven Kramer, Patrick Roest and Koen Verweij

If there was a big gold medal for sporting ne’er-do-wells, you would certainly want to keep it away from this lot, a quartet of Dutch speed-skaters who took to the stage at Heineken House, the Dutch Winter Olympic diplomacy operation-cum-party headquarters during February’s Pyeongchang-based spectacular, and decided it would be hilarious if they tossed the giant mock medal they were for some reason holding into the crowd that had gathered to hail their bronze success. Two female fans required hospital treatment to head wounds. “Fortunately things are going well with both ladies considering the circumstances, even though it was a shock to them,” the team said in a press release. “They said at a press conference that they apologised to me but I didn’t receive an apology. I haven’t seen them since then,” one injured spectator said. She had, she admitted, been invited to meet them but had refused because she failed to discern a “feeling of sincerity”. Blokhuijsen caused further controversy when, in a press conference after the men’s team pursuit, he exhorted people in South Korea to “please treat dogs better in this country”, creating such a furore that not only was he forced to apologise – “It was not my intention to insult you and your country. I hope we can make this a better place for both of us” – but the Dutch chef de mission, Jeroen Bijl, had to reassure local media that “we do respect the culture, people in Korea and the country of Korea”.

Yuya Nagayoshi, Takuya Hashimoto, Takuma Sato and Keita Imamura

Japan’s men’s basketball team laboured through most of the Asian Games short-handed after four of their number were sent home for celebrating a group-stage win over Qatar with a trip to Jakarta’s party capital, a late dinner and then a trip to a nearby hotel in the company of a group of women, with whom they engaged in “inappropriate acts”. This fell some way short of the behaviour demanded by the Japanese Olympic Committee’s code of conduct, which expects athletes to behave as nothing less than “model citizens”. “I deeply apologise for our careless act that has brought disgrace on not only basketball fans but also all of the Japanese people,” said Sato. “I just feel a sense of shame,” said Yasuhiro Yamashita, the head of the Japanese delegation. The swift punishments and wholehearted apologies contrasted markedly with the Mexico World Cup squad, several members of whom threw a party on the eve of their departure for Russia to which they invited 30 prostitutes but escaped sanction. “These are the risks that come from freedom,” shrugged Guillermo Cantú, the general secretary of the Mexico FA. “It’s not about whether we like it or not, we just have to admit that it was a free day for the players and they did not miss any training sessions.”

Wesley Harms or Gary Anderson

Last December the world of darts was embroiled in controversy over allegations of deliberate coughing – in January the alleged cougher, Justin Pipe, said “my character has been assassinated” and the kerfuffle had left him “flabbergasted and heartbroken” – and since then behaviour in the sport has gone if not downhill then certainly down the alimentary canal, leading to allegations of deliberate and offensive farting in November’s Grand Slam of Darts. After losing to Anderson, Harms said his poor performance was down to the “fragrant smell” emanating from his opponent. “It’ll take me two nights to lose this smell from my nose,” he sniffed. The allegations resulted in a furious riposte from Anderson, though the Scot said he too had detected some unpleasant odours. “I’m not going to lie about farting on stage,” he raged. “It was eggs, rotten eggs, but not from me. Every time I walked past [Harms] there was a waft of rotten eggs, so that’s why I was thinking it was him. It was bad. It was a stink. If somebody has done that they need to see a doctor.”

Ryan Fry and Jamie Koe

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Fry, a 2014 Winter Olympics gold medallist for Canada, and the rest of his team put the curling into toe-curling on their way to expulsion from the Red Deer Curling Classic in November. It is not unheard of for someone to drink so much on a night out that bar staff have to tell them they should leave in order to sober up, but it is more unusual for an entire team to do so, and for the staff to inform them they should leave in order to compete in an elite-level curling competition. “I guess they were here to party,” the event manager, Wade Thurber, said. “And then they went out to curl and it went sideways.” Koe, the team’s skip, ventured on to the ice long enough to have a couple of practice slides before excusing himself owing to inebriation, leaving his team a man down. The remaining trio went on to lose 10-5, a match memorable mainly for Fry’s outbursts of drunken pique, which led to three broken brooms. “It was temper. Smashed them,” Thurber said. “He hit one on the ice and broke the head off, and one on the scoreboard, and one over his knee.” Koe admitted his team “took our fun a little too far”, and Fry that his “actions were truly disrespectful and embarrassing”. “I’ve seen brooms broken before, smash marks in the ice,” Thurber said. “Guys get a little heated out there at times but usually it’s a quick one-minute incident and it’s done. This was kind of the whole game.”

Romano Fenati

You could argue that Gianni Moscon, the Team Sky rider expelled from the Tour de France for attempting to punch another cyclist mid-race, committed a more violent offence while on two wheels than Romano Fenati, but then he was not going at 130mph. That is the speed Fenati had reached when, during a Moto2 race in San Marino, he leaned towards a rival racer, Stefano Manzi, and grabbed his brake lever. He was disqualified, immediately banned for two races, dumped by his team, lost his license for the remainder of the year and abandoned the sport (he has since announced a return to Moto3 for 2019). “A horrible image of me and of the sport has come out,” he said. “I’m not like that. In my career I’ve always been a fair rider. Unfortunately I have an impulsive character.” Sadly a look back over Fenati’s career finds a not exactly unblemished record, which includes kicking out at another rider in 2015 and being suspended by his Sky Racing team the following year for “repeated behaviour not in line with the disciplinary rules of the team”. The British rider Cal Crutchlow said Fenati “should never compete on a motorcycle again” but the condemnation was not quite universal. “What Fenati did is completely unbelievable. I don’t know how the brain of a rider can think to do that,” said Aleix Espargaró, another rider. “But the result is that we are treating him as a murderer. It’s crazy, he is just a kid riding a bike.”