MacDougall: Canada’s Olympic soccer fiasco reflects the era

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As far as “opening ceremonies” go, having one of your Olympic teams accused of cheating before the actual Olympic opening ceremony is a spectacular one. So take a bow, Soccer Canada, whose women’s team is now under investigation by FIFA, soccer’s governing body.

Worryingly, it looks like an open and shut case. Team Canada assistant coach Jasmine Mander and analyst Joseph Lombardi have already been sent home by Canadian officials after a drone was flown over a Team New Zealand training session, while Canadian head coach Bev Priestman, a gold-medal winner with her team three years ago in Tokyo, has preemptively pulled herself off coaching duties for her team’s first game. For her part, Priestman says she didn’t “direct” the pair. This isn’t how we expected you to “go for Gold,” Team Canada.

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The whole incident could be much ado about nothing; we’ll have to wait and see. But it’s hard not to read it as a parable of the age. In a world where financial traders look for any “edge” they can find in markets and people feel entire systems are rigged, this soccer scandal feels sadly on point. If even the Canadian women’s soccer team is under investigation for cheating, can there be any honest athletes left?

We’ve been here before, of course — most famously when Ben Johnson was shot full of steroids to crush American rival Carl Lewis in the 100-metre sprint in 1988. The so-called “dirtiest race in history” left an indelible mark on Canadian amateur sport. The intervening 35 years are not likely to have improved people’s opinions. While sport might be the one remaining acceptable outlet for out-and-out nationalism, the means increasingly being used to justify getting to the podium risk turning off the audiences they’re meant to satisfy.

This is true for the Olympics as a whole as well, the hosting of which has turned into a nightmare for any nation. Just ask Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, fresh from her dip in the still-poop-infested Seine, despite €1.5 billion of public money being invested to clean it up ahead of Olympic swimming events. France has been reduced to praying it doesn’t rain heavily enough to overwhelm Paris’ ancient sewer system on race days.

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And while poor poop clean-up might not be the immediate source of French frustration with their government, it’s a handy symbol of the kind of trophy spending being done by governments around the world, when citizens have more prosaic needs. Spending money to clean up a major river is the right thing to do, but badging it up as a PR exercise for an international audience sure isn’t the way to sell it to a population worried about the cost of putting food into their mouths.

But the feel-good factor! The feeling of the eyes of the world being on you! We’ve had a tough time of it these last many years; surely the Olympics are a way to forget about the world for a moment?

Yes, they are, or at least they were, but they won’t be if we make them about something other than what they should be: a celebration of human accomplishment with respect to sport. Think Nadia Comăneci. Or Usain Bolt. This isn’t a battle of East versus West, or authoritarians versus the free world. The respective boycotts of the Moscow Olympics of 1980 and the 1984 games in Los Angeles didn’t end the Cold War; that was done by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. Equally, Ukraine will not be “won” by targeting Russian athletes. And while the Chinese might be “creating” their athletes as one prong of their quest for global dominance, the East Germans can tell them how that particular story ends.

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The geopolitics will fade as events get underway, even if, much like the poop in the Seine, they won’t fully slip out of view. The glut of tickets left on the market is a proxy for the stink currently wafting out of the Olympic movement. It’s a diminished occasion, and cheating before the opening bell isn’t the way to rekindle the spirit.

Andrew MacDougall is a London-based communications consultant and ex-director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper.

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