Already suspended, the coach of the Canadian women’s Soccer team Bev Priestman was fired on Tuesday following an independent investigation by - revealing spying on the training of opposing teams with the approval of national coaches.
Listen to journalist Romain Schué, from the Enquête show, at the microphone of Mario Langlois, at Sports Amateurs.
“This is something that has been going on for years within Canada Soccer and which has even been known and endorsed by leaders of the association,” said the journalist.
Employees had to obey the demands of John Herdman and Bev Priestman or risk losing their jobs.
“It’s really this pressure that was put in place. A sentence that stood out to me was a former player who told me: “‘No’ was not an option. So you had to follow what you were ordered, otherwise it was going to be very difficult to continue working within the national team.”
Ironically, Canada got caught in Paris almost by accident, since French authorities were mainly concerned about terrorist attacks, not sports espionage.
“I’m going to tell you what a player told me: “Everyone does it, but only Canada was naive enough to try to do it in a competition like the Olympic Games, which is the most watched and monitored in the world.”
“I think that sums things up pretty well. At the Paris Olympic Games, an instruction was given to all selections, to all teams: do not use drones in France, it is prohibited. (…) There was this instruction, because there was a risk of terrorist attacks.”
Canada
