Canada’s former national women’s soccer team coach Bev Priestman, centre, runs the team’s practice, on Oct. 26, 2023 in Montreal.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
On Tuesday, Canada Soccer released the results of its promised independent investigation into spying at the Paris Olympics.
Of all the tidbits revealed in it, the sentence that stood out to me was on page six of the summary report provided to the board of directors:
“After [redacted] sent an e-mail to [redacted] on [redacted], and that e-mail was forwarded to [redacted], [redacted] [redacted] and [redacted] [redacted], [redacted] [redacted], [redacted] were aware of [redacted] concerns regarding [redacted] direction to [redacted] to conduct surreptitious surveillance of opponents.”
Fascinating. Some feared this might be about [redacted]. But now that we know it’s [redacted], we may have to reconsider everything.
No names are named in the summary report, even the ones we already know. Canada Soccer says this is in order to “comply” with its “legal obligations.” What does that mean? Is it being sued? Is it suing? Like everything else this in-part publicly funded organization does, it’s not explained.
Reading what has been provided, one cannot say who knew what when, how or why they did what they did, or where whatever it was took place. You can just barely understand that it had something to do with soccer.
As released, the report isn’t Orwellian. It’s Oulipian. It is a feat of narration worthy of Italo Calvino to publish something this long that does not clearly answer a single W5H question. What answers there are are provided by Canada Soccer in its own summation, and many aren’t really answers.
For instance, “The drone footage was not viewed by women’s national team members.”
You don’t do probes to figure out who didn’t do something. You do them to figure out who did. We still don’t know that part because no one’s willing to tell us.
The only person who comes in for special mention by name is the architect of the women’s national program, John Herdman. There is an additional notes section that seems aimed at him.
The investigator, Sonia Regenbogen, tried to talk to Herdman, but he was far too busy losing professional soccer games with Toronto FC to waste time with lawyers. The comedy writes itself.
Herdman can’t escape what’s coming, but it does seem strange that the only person really getting it on the chin wasn’t even in Paris.
The two women’s team coaches already suspended by FIFA, including head coach Bev Priestman, will not be returning. The analyst who was caught flying the drone already resigned. That’s a line stuck in near the end of one of the released documents. Everyone else gets to hide behind this facsimile of full disclosure and call it a day.
This whole thing has been the most Canadian thing ever. The worst part wasn’t the cheating. Most countries have, will or do cheat at the Olympics. Most of them try to wriggle out of it once caught. None of that is notable.
What really hurt was the lack of ambition. Russia builds a whole medical lab inside the Olympic village to swap out urine samples. That’s thinking big.
What does Canada do? ‘Hey, maybe we can watch some game tape to see who takes the corner kicks, which doesn’t really matter anyway, or maybe we can go to Best Buy and make this a team building exercise?’
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a plot line from Harriet the Spy. The distance between risk (huge) and reward (none to speak of) is a chasm. Only a very foolish person – or in Canada’s case, a whole bunch of them – could think this was a good idea.
The story had legs not because it was nefarious, but because it wasn’t. It confirmed the most hilarious international stereotypes of Canadians – a bunch of agreeable nitwits who can’t even get cheating right.
The smart thing to do in that circumstance is appeal to another Canadian cliché – that we are incapable of conniving.
Do a report. Release the report. Hand out swords around the office. Tell everyone to fall on them.
That’s what Denmark would do. Or New Zealand. Or some other nice country where ethical conventions still mean something. Having been caught, they would reclaim some medium-height moral ground by confessing without reservation.
I guess we’re not Scandinavia any more. Rather than take its licks, Canada Soccer is still out here making moves.
Only this organization could release a report that looks like a mob wiretap and then straight-facedly say it is “trying to demonstrate our continued commitment to transparency.”
“Continued?”
When did it start?
Sitting here now, I know more for sure about extraterrestrial landings at Area 51 than I do about Canada Soccer’s own UFO program. The aliens people have appeared before U.S. Congress. The soccer people still haven’t answered to anyone.
This parsimonious approach is drawn from the Hockey Canada handbook, which does at least show that Canadian sports organizations have learned something from each other’s lapses. Just not in the way you’d hope.
The longer you can draw this sort of thing out, the more investigations you can do, the more statements you release, the more promises to change that you can make, the more likely it is that people will lose interest.
Of those promises made recently, the one that has the greatest ring of truth is a line from Canada Soccer board chair Peter Augruso.
“We know that more needs to be done and that change takes time,” Augruso said in a statement last week.
Canada cheated at the Olympics. It knows who cheated, even if we still don’t. That’s everything it needs to know.
So why does change “take time”? It should take as long as it takes for HR and the lawyers to write a few e-mails.
It’s because the goal isn’t the first part of that sentence. It’s the second – to take time. Keep ducking, keep dodging, keep running out the clock. Eventually, everyone will forget why they were angry in the first place.