PARIS — What a clumsy, arrogant and ignorant beginning this has been for Canadian Soccer, tripping all over itself before a ball has been booted at the Summer Olympic Games.
And the Canadian Olympic Committee followed up news of this shocking Canadian soccer scandal by believing the nonsense head coach Bev Priestman was selling about her lack of involvement in the illegal taping of New Zealand’s practices, which might make for a nice fairy tale some day.
Anyone who has been around sport for more than a minute knows that assistant coaches, on their own, subservient by nature, don’t go around using drones to tape another team’s practices, let alone using another kind of technology.
If they’re doing that, they’re doing it with the blessing of the head coach.
The coach in this case and in almost every case controls the team environment.
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So Joe Lombardi and Jasmine Mander get sent home from from the Olympics, disgraced really, while the head coach won’t take part in Thursday’s match against New Zealand. Basically, she banished herself, but her life, it not her reputation, may return to normal on Friday.
Maybe.
Canada likes to talk a lot about safe sports and the integrity of sport and the honesty of sport and those aren’t just words when selling the Olympic product across the country.
“Winning the right way is the only way for us,” said David Shoemaker, the CEO of the COC.
Shoemaker had a chance to win the right way Wednesday by sending Priestman home as well. He chose the opposite. He chose to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
This has not been a great few days for Canadian soccer and the COC. On July 22 in Paris, the Canadian delegation was informed by police that there were spying allegations regarding soccer practices held by New Zealand, Canada’s opening match opponent in the women’s tournament.
Welcome to Paris and it wasn’t Inspector Clouseau on the phone.
At the time, the COC launched its own investigation into the matter. It determined that not only had Team Canada used drones to tape on New Zealand practice session, but Canada has done so twice.
Do you honestly believe that the assistants who were sent home, both coaches of considerable quality, acted on their own in this case? I don’t know anyone who has been around sport at high level for any kind of term that would believe that to be true.
The police investigation into Canada’s cheating has not concluded. The world governing body of soccer, FIFA, will discipline Canada in some way, here or at a later date. The International Olympic Committee is allowing FIFA to do its job and not worry about Canada’s problems here while the New Zealand delegation is requesting immediate sanctions of some kind against Canada.
How any of this happened on anyone’s watch is beyond credulity. This is Bill Belichick-like and women’s soccer is hardly the big money game that is the National Football League.
This is Canada’s most popular team from the previous Summer Olympic Games and its name and reputation already has been tarnished. This was so remarkably inept on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin.
And the fact that the CEO of the COC has to answer these type of questions just an hour or so after Canada named Andre De Grasse and Maude Charron — two incredible Canadian athletes — as the flag bearers for Friday night’s Opening Ceremony, the good news announced, seemed all the more incredulous and impossible.
Charron was asked what advice she would have for fellow athletes marching behind her Friday night and it almost seemed like she was talking to the COC and of the soccer scandal.
“I’d tell them to remember who you are and what your values are,” Charron said. “And why you do what you do in sport.
“Put down your phone and take mental pictures” said Charron, whose English occasionally is a struggle but wasn’t here.
Soccer Canada and the COC need to put down their phones now and understand how blurry a picture this is right now.
Reputations already have been ruined here. The assistants Lombardi and Mander were thought to be two of the better soccer coaches in Canada. That was yesterday, not necessarily today.
Priestman coached Canada to gold in Tokyo at the COVID-19 Games. She was Mike Babcock four years ago. And now in a different kind of way, she becomes Mike Babcock again.
The coach nobody will want.
“We thought about all the repercussions for Bev,” Shoemaker said. “I was persuaded by the fact that Bev Priestmann had no knowledge or involvement in this.”
He said that with a straight face. He said that with naive sincerity. Down the road he will probably regret saying it and not doing what needed to be done here.
“There’s no room for that on Team Canada,” Shoemaker said. “It doesn’t conform to our standards of fair play.”
Shoemaker called this an integrity issue. The integrity of a team, a game, a sport, a country. So many levels to think about.
The integrity that went missing when there was one more move to be made and the COC looked the other way.