Katie Kitching of New Zealand, and Canada's Jade Rose vie for control of the ball as the two teams face off in the Paris 2024 Olympics at Geoffroy-Guichard Stadium, in Saint-Etienne, France on July 25.Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters
After watching Canada’s women’s soccer team cut a series of trails through the New Zealand defence for a couple of hours on Thursday, a new question about the spying scandal comes to mind – Why?
All cheating is bad, but this cheating was pointless. Why do it? Why risk your good name so needlessly?
For a bit in the early going of Thursday’s game, the irony alarm was going off. Against the run of play, New Zealand scored the first goal from a corner kick. Insert your ‘undelivered drone footage’ joke here.
But by the end, Canada had taken more than four times as many shots as its opponents, won 2-1 and could have scored five more.
Its real pain began a half-hour later, as the players were funnelled through the mixed zone. Everybody in Canadian colours was sorry, but not exactly sure how to say sorry without making things worse.
“Whatever happened, obviously, we’re sorry about that,” said senior player Kadeisha Buchanan, arguably the most senior Canadian player now that Christine Sinclair is gone. “I think those things are out of our control.”
Did the players have any idea what was going on?
“No, I think us as players just focus on the game. The coaches come and tell us the game plan.”
The Canadian soccer setup has a lot of problems right now, and one of the biggest is a ‘No’ problem. No one can give an unequivocal denial.
Assistant coach Andy Spence led the team on Thursday after head coach Bev Priestman sentenced herself to one game’s absence. (At 1:24 on Friday morning, the COC removed Priestman from her role at the Games because Canada Soccer had suspended her pending an investigation.)
Did Spence know anything about the spying?
“Obviously, the statements have gone out and I follow the lead of what the COC statement’s been, and the statements that Canada Soccer has released,” Spence said.
When it was put back to him that it’s either a no or it’s not, Spence said, “Obviously, from my point of view, uh, no, obviously the statement’s gone out …”
From your point of view?
So we went round one more time – were you aware that Canada was spying on New Zealand?
“No,” Spence said.
See? How hard was that?
Whoever is advising Canada’s principals about media strategy ought to buy themselves a newspaper subscription or a TV and check out how this whole ‘media’ thing works. When you answer questions like Richard Nixon in his flop-sweat era, you get treated like him.
If the Canadian women’s soccer team wants to distance themselves from a couple of bad actors, they should take actual steps to do that. Anything else sounds like prevarication.
But shifty is the standing order of deportment for the Canadian sports establishment. When the going gets hard, they release statements.
Still, that wasn’t the depressing part in Saint-Étienne. The depressing bit was hearing from some of the New Zealand players and coach.
Because they aren’t angry. They’re disappointed. That’s a word that came up a lot – “disappointed.”
“When we found out [the drone] was linked to Canada, it was shocking,” said goal scorer Mackenzie Barry, actually looking shocked.
What about those – and the cynics have already piled into this story – who say everybody does this?
“If other people are doing it, it doesn’t make it right,” Barry said.
I’m not fully clear on the citizenship requirements, but Barry for prime minister.
Perhaps the best person to judge how this has been handled by the Canadian staff is their opposite number, New Zealand lead coach Michael Mayne. He has some right to feel the most offended party here.
Mayne was at pains not to pick a fight. He didn’t want to comment on whether Priestman’s original suspension was appropriate – “That’s none of my business.”
He praised Canada for its post-drone behaviour – “I acknowledge Canada’s swiftness in dealing with it internally.”
He said repeatedly that his team had lost fair and square on Thursday.
But all of this was done with the sort of hemming and head-nodding-back-and-forth that indicates someone who is thinking overly hard about the impact of their words.
It wasn’t until it was put to him as a hypothetical – what would he do if someone on his staff was caught doing something like this? – that Mayne spoke without consideration.
“It wouldn’t happen,” he said, making sure to hit direct eye contact. “It’s pretty simple, right?”
It’s not difficult to guess at the calculation here. By Friday night, Celine Dion will have done her thing and these Games will get going in a serious way, after which a weird little cheating story involving Canada is going to be old news.
The COC, the Canadian coaching staff and the players just have to get to the other side of that barrier, and they’re safe.
Now it’s in Summer McIntosh’s hands. If things go her way, the Canadian women’s soccer team can take the field on Sunday knowing they are not at the top of anyone’s A1 stack.
That is, as long as no one speaks out of turn or takes any responsibility for what happened.
If they can manage that, it’s probably going to work. But is it Olympic?
The modern template for sports scandal is say nothing, and just win. As long as you win, nothing else will matter.
That’s the sort of thinking that got Canada into this mess. It seems odd that it might also be used to get it out of it.
However it turns out here, there is no real winning for this team. You could sense that from Buchanan’s tone.
She’s won nearly everything that can be won, at home and abroad. With Sinclair gone, this was the Olympics where she took over. Paris should be Buchanan’s triumphal march as one of the pre-eminent team athletes of her generation.
Instead, she’s leaned over a rail after a win, talking as though it’s a loss, trying to explain how she knows some people will now think of Canada as cheaters: “We thought that kicking off this Olympics, the story would be different about us.”