New Zealand's Katie Kitching, left, and Canada's Jade Rose vie for the ball during the women's Group A soccer match between Canada and New Zealand at Geoffroy-Guichard stadium during the 2024 Summer Olympics, in Saint-Etienne, France on July 25.Silvia Izquierdo/The Associated Press
Declan Hill is an associate professor of investigations at the University of New Haven and lead of its Sports Integrity Center. He is the author of The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime and the forthcoming book Birds of Prey: The Real World of Sports Gambling.
Many Canadians were surprised to see Canada’s women’s soccer team plunged into scandal after being caught using a drone to spy on a rival team. But sadly, it’s no surprise to find sports coaches and staff acting this way.
The sports world is a largely conviction-free zone, where any accountability is covered with a dross of words about “ethics” and “values.”
In the drone-spying scandal, the suspended national coach Bev Priestman declared, “This does not represent the values that our team stands for.”
Really? So when our team uses an expensive drone that somebody must have bought, someone must have been trained to use and someone must have figured out where the opposing team was – it was all an accident?
According to a superb investigation by Rick Westhead of TSN, the Canadian men’s and women’s national soccer teams have a long history of spying on opposition teams. The article claims Canada spied against New Zealand, Panama, Costa Rica, South Korea, Japan, Trinidad and the United States.
The whole time no one did anything. Junior staff were apparently pressured into carrying out spying, which was considered part of the job. Everyone kept on talking about “ethics” but nothing changed, as spying is common in soccer.
One of the greatest coaches of the modern era is José Mourinho, now of the Turkish powerhouse Fenerbahçe. When he was at Chelsea, his assistant André Villas-Boas, also a famous coach, said to the English newspaper The Telegraph, he was sent to “travel to training grounds, often incognito, and look at our opponents’ mental and physical state before drawing my conclusions.”
Mr. Mourinho is not the only famous soccer manager to spy. Marcelo Bielsa is the coach of the Uruguayan national team. He is renowned for his passionate monologues during news conferences bemoaning dreadful refereeing, poor training grounds and biased treatment against his team. But Mr. Bielsa spies on his opponents so often that he speaks openly of watching the training sessions of all his opponents before playing them.
Spying is hardly the worst offence in sports. While the pomp and misplaced ceremony of the Paris Olympics plays out, there is still rampant sexual, physical and mental abuse of athletes across sports, countries and cultures.
This abuse comes from one essential power dynamic. The coach controls the athlete’s gateway to immortality. Every sports person wants to perform and win at the very highest level. So many coaches and officials demand an awful price to allow them do so.
We have seen countless scandals, from junior hockey to the U.K. Premier League to Olympics gymnastics. A scapegoat is found and, if unlucky, punished publicly, but the system goes on.
This abuse in sports is so common that the triple Olympic gold medal winner Nancy Hogshead, who dedicated her career to cleaning up sports, says, “Not every coach is a pedophile, but every pedophile wants to be a coach.”
It’s the flip side of all the glamour and glory that we see on our screens while the Olympics flashes past us. The dark side behind the glittering show.
Very few journalists speak about it. They love pretending that our young people are safe in the glamorous sports world, when the truth is often the opposite. So they write and speak about the beautiful people, but do nothing to protect them.
The Olympics is also rife with doping. Ten years ago, the bravest couple in sports, Vitaly and Yuliya Stepanov, came forward with the results of their extraordinary investigation. They are the whistle-blowers who exposed the dirty secrets of near-compulsory doping at the heart of both Russian and international sports.
Because of their work, the Russian team was banned from several Olympics and there were a number of mysterious deaths of Russian anti-doping officials. Sports officials were convicted in a Paris criminal case of accepting millions of dollars in bribes to cover up positive doping tests while running a “mafia-like organization.”
Yet, dozens on the Chinese swim team tested positive for doping while winning medals at the last Olympics. Many of these same athletes have returned to the Paris Games. The response of the Canadian-based organization World Anti-Doping Agency? They spoke at length and loudly about ethics, while choosing to believe China’s defence that the ingestion was accidental. In other words, they did nothing.
Meanwhile, the real stuff, the criminal, loathsome pushing of our young people into body harming doping, and sexual abuse by their coaches, goes on accompanied only by a soundtrack by these same sports officials about ethics and values.