Paris Olympics: Behind the Curtain Nothing has Changed
While the Olympic show goes on – the doping, gambling addiction and sexual abuse of athletes continues….
Nothing has changed.
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 UK 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, claims, "Not every coach is a pedophile, but every pedophile wants to be a coach."
Its the flip side of all the glamour and glory that we see on our screens while the Olympic 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 a 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.
Nothing has changed.
Ten years ago, the bravest couple in sports - Vitaly and Yulia Stepanov, came forward with the results of their extraordinary investigation. They are the whistleblowers 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 other Russian anti-doping officials. As for the men who ran international track and field. They were convicted in a Paris criminal case of accepting millions of dollars in bribes to cover up positive dope tests while running a "mafia-like organization”.
Yet, last week, dozens of the Chinese swim team were found to have been doping while wining 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 (WADA)? Speak long and loudly about ethics but do nothing.
Nothing has changed.
While watching sports, Canadians are bombarded with gambling advertisements while addiction to betting among our young people rises exponentially. There are waves of match-fixing scandals around the world. My team at the University of New Haven, identified over-a-hundred suspicious games in the last few weeks many involving women or under-20 teams. Yet we are told that gambling is a wonderful growth opportunity for sports.
Nothing has changed.
In the drone spying scandal, the soon-to-be-ex-national coach, Bev Priestman declared “This does not represent the values that our team stand 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 team has a long history of spying on opposition teams. We did it against New Zealand. We also did it against Panama, Costa Rica, South Korea, Japan, Trinidad and, where the canker really gnaws, the United States.
The whole time no one did anything. One assistant coach even had their contract canceled when they would not participate.
Nothing changed because spying is very common in soccer.
One of the greatest coaches of the modern era is Jose Mourinho, now of the Turkish powerhouse Fenerbahce. When he was at Chelsea, his assistant Andre 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”.
Mourinho is not the only famous soccer manager to spy. Marcelo Bielsa is the coach of the Uruguayan national team. He is renown for his passionate monologues during press conferences bemoaning dreadful refereeing, poor training grounds and biased treatment against his team. But Bielsa spies on his opponents so often that he speaks openly of, “We watched training sessions of all the opponents before we played them.”
As for the National Football League, lets just not mention Bill Belichick, the most successful coach in the league, with his “Deflategate” tactics and history of stealing his opponents defensive sign steals.
Meanwhile, the real stuff, the appalling, criminal, loathsome pushing of our young people into body harming doping, gambling addiction, and sexual abuse by coaches and sports officials goes on almost completely unchecked.
Nothing has changed.