Canada coach Bev Priestman gestures during a training session ahead of the FIFA Women's World Cup in Melbourne, Australia, on July 17, 2023.Scott Barbour/The Canadian Press
When the drone scandal blew up a couple of days before the start of the Paris Games, Canada’s head coach Bev Priestman released a statement via the Canadian Olympic Committee.
“This does not represent the values that our team stands for,” Priestman said. To “emphasize our team’s commitment to integrity, I have decided to voluntarily withdraw from coaching the [first] match on Thursday.”
It is the statement of someone who feels themselves impervious to professional harm. And why not? Priestman had a gold medal for armour. In Canada, that’s close to bulletproof.
Canada Soccer and the COC proved the point by going along with her. They thought they could press release their way out of a jam. But soon a higher power – FIFA, the world’s governing body for soccer – took an interest.
In short order, Priestman was talking through a lawyer. Then she was suspended. Then she and Canada Soccer parted ways. And then it got bad.
An investigation in The Globe and Mail over the weekend detailed some of the ways in which Priestman’s program was out of control. Semi-mandatory booze-ups, bullying, institutionalized cheating and, weirdly, grown ups throwing sex toys at each other. You could make this stuff up, but who’d believe you?
On Sunday, a lawyer representing Priestman said The Globe story contained allegations that were untrue, but did not specify what she was referring to.
We are reminded again that teams are like Tolstoy’s families. The good ones are alike, but the dysfunctional ones are dysfunctional in their own delightful way.
The women’s national team was the jewel in the crown of the Canadian Olympic program because it was the program that got talked about most between Games.
In public, it was praised (largely by itself) for inspiring kids and fighting for equal rights. In private, it sounds like Game of Thrones with an open bar.
The obvious question is how a publicly funded set-up that had to commission two independent investigations, before the Olympics, into its culture and leadership was allowed to carry on this way for so long?
Easy – they won.
They didn’t win all the time, but they won when it mattered. They were clever enough to build this winning Olympic narrative slowly, over a decade. Battling bronze, chippy bronze and then – ta daaaaa – surprise gold.
The team’s fame was resilient as well as loud. It lasted well beyond Tokyo, and outstripped the attention paid to the six other golds Canada won at those Games. Those other wins included victories for sprinting and wrestling. This one was a victory for progress.
When you’re in the Olympics business, attention is money. And no one turns down money. To have at any point mentioned terms like “toxic workplace” and “independent investigation” would have broken off the cash tap. So no one did.
Regardless of what had happened, or what was still happening, the same people understood that it could all be made okay again as long as the soccer team won. In France, you could feel that shift happening in real time. There was at first widespread public exasperation that the coaches could be so stupid. Who goes to the world’s most policed event and starts flying drones around willy nilly? Were they trying to make us all look like rubes?
Irritation turned to anger as everyone in charge dipped around direct questions with increasingly baroque deflections.
But then the team started to win. They were seconds from elimination when they beat France. That was the point at which the comments under stories changed from ‘Why did they do this? To ‘Why are we still talking about this?’
When Canada lost to Germany in the quarters, the anger resumed.
What if it had won that game? And the next? And the final? If that had happened, we’d be having a different conversation now.
It wouldn’t be one about a defective program going way back. Instead, we’d be talking about how one or two saboteurs managed to hide for so long within a masterful project.
Flawed? Sure. What program doesn’t have its flaws? The work of winning is constant improvement. All mistakes are learning opportunities. Especially the disqualifying ones, and most especially if you were the one who made them.
This sort of self-help gibberish was the foundation of a statement made by Priestman on Instagram roughly coinciding with The Globe’s exposé.
“I hope out of a really tough situation this is a turning point for our game,” Priestman wrote. “There has been a standard and precedent set now, irrespective of gender, tournament or associated revenues that will hopefully clean up our game.”
That is so disconnected from reality that one can only marvel at it. Bravo.
But you get why she did it. This story is reaching its conclusion. The worst of it is out there. An apology, however poor, is the precondition to getting a job elsewhere. Now the feelers can be put out.
Eventually, no one will be able to remember who exactly did what, or the fine details of what happened. If you can’t point to the person responsible, I guess no one did it. In any case, it all seems so long ago (last summer) and L.A. 2028 is coming up so fast. Best to move on.
We wanted Own the Podium. This is what it looks like.
If you put winning at the top of your org chart, everything else is subordinated to it, including sportsmanship and basic decency.
Winners get the attention, the praise, the money and, when things go wrong, they get an easy ride. All they have to do is say they lost their way. Temporarily. No one’s fault, really. Why are we still talking about this?
The only thing that won’t be forgiven is losing. Losers get no attention and very little praise and almost no money. If they do something wrong, they are scourged relentlessly so that everyone can see what we do to bad actors.
No new lessons have been learned here, but one as old as human civilization has been reinforced. As long as the women’s soccer team (or the junior hockey team or the bank or the government) continues to win, then they were right to do whatever they did, however wrong it may have been.