Sports potted history of racist comments

Australian swimming legend Dawn Fraser. Photo / Getty Images.

Australian swimming legend Dawn Fraser sunk to a terrible low with her racist comments about a couple of tennis players.

She is not alone, by a long shot. Here is a potted history of sports racist comments and what came next.

1) Greek triple jumper Paraskeivi Papachristou was pulled from the London Olympics in 2012 after ranting on Twitter: "With so many Africans in Greece...the West Nile mosquitoes will at least eat homemade food." One man had died in a small outbreak of West Nile virus in Athens at the time. And to think, Greece is the hometown of Olympic spirit. Her apology was inadvertently foot in mouth, the 23-year-old describing her terrible tweet as "tasteless".

2) Wigan Athletic football chairman Dave Whelan knew how to rub salt into his self-inflicted wounds. After copping rebukes for suggesting Jews "chase money", he raised "Chingalings" as a description for Chinese in his apology to the Jewish Telegraph. In the wake of the controversy, the 78-year-old Whelan resigned this year, sort of, by appointing his 23-year-old grandson as the new chairman.

3) Famed football manager turned commentator Ron Atkinson scored one of the great own goals when in 2004 he described Chelsea's Marcel Desailly as "what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy thick n*****." A microphone had been left on, sending Atkinson to the Hall of Infamy. He wasn't finished with his racist-bombs either. He was at it again in 2013 with an anti-Muslim bomb "joke" on Celebrity Big Brother, a show that was supposed to rehabilitate him after years in the wilderness. "If I have said anything offensive, I'm sorry," he pleaded. If?

4) Muhammad Ali, the self-proclaimed greatest, would do anything to denigrate opponents but largely got away with it here through the power of his magnetic personality and because he was black. His amazing trio of fights against loyal, dignified and tough Joe Frazier was a mis-match in the verbals department. Ali referred to Frazier as an "Uncle Tom" and "gorilla", terms which used America's racist history against another black man. Frazier felt the pain until the day he died, but ironically had the last word against the disgusting taunts. With Ali wrecked by Parkinson's Disease, Frazier said: "God's shut him up. He can't talk no more because he was saying the wrong things."

5) Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder was a famous American TV sportscaster who brought sports betting into the living room. He took a famous tumble after telling an interviewer "the black is a better athlete to begin with because he's been bred to be that way" and a heck of a lot more. Snyder -- perhaps dangerously unsophisticated for his own good -- admitted to the "foolish" claims but was sacked and became a lonely, broke Las Vegas wreck.