At the highest level of elite sport, the pressure to win is suffocating. Every athlete is trying to perform as the very best in the world, hoping to bring a medal home to a country full of supporters.
The stress over winning can cause a competitor to cross the line. Not the finish line, but the line between competing with integrity and full-on cheating.
Before the opening ceremony for the 2024 Paris Olympics had even commenced, a cheating scandal emerged involving a drone flying over a team’s training camp. While training in Saint-Étienne, France, in the days leading up to their opening match against current Olympic champions Canada, the Football Ferns noticed a drone flying over their camp.
The New Zealand team staff notified police immediately, and the drone was traced back to a member of the Canadian Olympic Team, Joseph Lombardi. Later that week the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) came out with a statement claiming that Lombardi had used the drone “to record the New Zealand women’s football team during practice.”
The COC later showered New Zealand with apologies, and coach Lombardi, his manager Jasmine Mander and head coach Bev Preistman have been sent home from the tournament. Preistman released a statement on her departure, saying “to emphasize our team’s commitment to integrity, I have decided to voluntarily withdraw from coaching the match on Thursday. In the spirit of accountability, I do this with the interests of both teams in mind and to ensure everyone feels that the sportsmanship of this game is upheld.”
The game took place this morning, with Canada beating New Zealand 2-1. However, investigations are hardly at full time with FIFA and New Zealand Football claiming that inspections of the incident will continue. The IOC is yet to comment on the issue.
But why were Canada allowed to play the game against New Zealand in the first place?
According to multiple sources, the drone footage recorded the New Zealand team during their training sessions. This footage could be used to preview how the team will play in their match, allowing Canada the upper hand in adjusting accordingly.
While the players are not at fault for the incident, they are still guilty by association. Any insights gained from the footage could have easily been integrated into Canada’s training sessions, giving the team an unfair advantage.
Therefore, I believe that sending a few coaches home is hardly an adequate punishment for the team. The only proportional repercussion that the team should face is forfeiting the match against New Zealand.
At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Canadian Sprinter Ben Johnson won the 100-metre race in world-record time. Three days after the victory he tested positive for stanozolol, an anabolic steroid that gives competitors a speedier recovery time and greater strength. He was disqualified from the race and his gold medal was stripped.
The IOC claims to have a “zero-tolerance policy to combat cheating and hold accountable anyone responsible for using or providing doping products.” While the committee has taken great measures to reduce doping in the games, it’s hard to understand why this doesn’t cross over into other forms of cheating.
In a team sport, knowing your opposition is the biggest advantage that you can have. While the coaches were sent home as punishment, that doesn’t erase the total advantage that Canada’s team could have gained. There’s simply no way of proving that the Canadian team could have played with full integrity amid this scandal, and there’s therefore no way of proving that they didn’t win due to an unfair advantage.
The only true way for Canada’s team to keep their integrity in the tournament is to forfeit the match, or be completely disqualified from the tournament. Trust between teams has now fizzled away, and there’s no telling what other measures that the team has taken to gain an advantage.
It is interesting to see how the IOC have completely ignored the issue, leaving it up to individual Olympic Committees to sort out. One of the IOC’s three main values is respect, described as “respect towards yourself, the rules, your opponents, the environment, the public,” but through this incident the organisation is showing its lack of regards towards its own values.
If the IOC wants to continue to build a better world through sport, it should start enforcing its own values through its own tournaments. Allowing a cheating team to continue to compete is a disgrace completely goes against the morals of the games, and just condones their actions for other teams to replicate in the future.
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