Pablo Torre Finds Out - Battle of the Bulge: We Expose a Crotch Conspiracy Rocking the Olympics

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Deflategate. Sign-stealing. Lance Armstrong. The competition is stiff, but no dynasty comes close to trying this hard to get ahead. In a soup-to-nuts collaboration, The Athletic's Matthew Futterman reports from the nether regions of the Winter Games on a national nightmare, a Zapruder tape and a confidential investigative report that will redefine the integrity of sport — no matter how impossible it... seams.• Read more from The Athletic: "How Norway's ski-jumping scandal rocked a proud nation and bedrock Olympic sport" Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. We have a tool created to measure the crutch measurement of all the athletes, which we're doing before the jump and after the jump. Right after this ad. I've been sort of like puzzling through what should be the first sort of collaboration that I do with the Times and the athletic. Right. My capacity as licensing partner of the athletic podcast network and the New York Times company. And I was like, let's get Matt Futterman Pulitzer Prize winner. Right. Nailed it. Forget about this small matter of the NFL playoff that might be going on right now. Who cares about that?

I was shocked to discover that the Olympics are like around the corner, though. It snuck up on me, Matt. Like, that's your life. It's not my life. Right. And I did think to myself, oh, there's, we got a newspeg here. Sneaks up on me a little bit too. I mean, how many is this now?

This is my tenth that I'll be on the ground for. God. Yeah. I mean, your beat, if I can describe it at The Athletic, is a fun one. I know your byline because you're the guy who does sports scandals, especially around like competitive advantage. I mean, you're an author as well who's covered that topic, generally speaking. And also, you do all these sports that I know nothing about.

And that's useful. So thank you for being in studio with me. Well, thanks for having me. And I guess we got to, you know, get you on the tennis court. a little more, get you on skis a little more, get you on snow. The skis and the snow, I mean, that is a big fascination that I have because I've spent the last, you know, more than I've ever thought thinking about the Winter Olympics, which is full of scandal historically, by the way, to just like remind our audience here, it's Russian doping

in Sochi. That was 2014. And there was also, you know, the 15-year-old Russian doper in Beijing in 2022. And then, you know, like Tony Harding and the pipe and. Various body parts have been very important to understand when it comes to the history of scandal and investigation in your world. I mean, Olympic sports are completely ridden with scandal from start to finish. It's certainly in the modern era. And it's hard to believe something topping the Russian doping scandal of 2014, you know,

where they actually, like, constructed the building with the goal of cheating. Well, the question fundamentally that my show is obsessed with is how to cheat. And the follow-up question is how to catch the cheaters. And the follow-up question to that is, why and how does this differ depending on who is cheating? And so the geopolitical lens of like who is cheating and what's their philosophy about it and what are they trying to get away with and what drives them and also what haunts them is why Russia is on one side. of the spectrum. And this subject, today's episode, which involves, by the way, you know, we got a sophisticated scheme.

We have an actual behind-the-curdent video that I can't wait for people to understand. We got confidential documents that I'm waving around recklessly already in my hand. It builds to something that can only be fairly described as crotch gate. There are many ways to cheat in sports. You can cork a baseball bat to make it light. deflate a football to make it easier to grip. But how do you cheat in ski jumping? If you're the Norwegian team, you alter the suit.

Specifically in the crotch area, and they caught Team Norway, right-handed. Yeah, below the belt. We'd like to say this is a family-family program, but there may be segments where, you know... It's a good trigger warning, now. You've got to put the earmuffs on the small children, potentially. We're going downhill in a very different sense.

Definitely. So for people who may already be tuning out because they're like, wait a minute, you tricked us into hearing you talk about a sport that I personally, of course, had very little knowledge of until we started reporting the story with you. The sport, which is ski jumping, I need you to explain because when you watch ski jumping, Matt, what are you seeing as a spectator? To some extent, you're seeing an optical illusion, especially when you watch ski jumping, Matt, what are you seeing as a spectator? Especially when you watch it on television. It looks like an athlete goes off a jump and is flying hundreds of feet above the ground. And landing on skis. And while they are flying hundreds of feet through the air,

they're actually never more than about 15 feet above the ground. Now, having said that, they do take off at like, you know, 65 miles an hour or something like that, and they're flying down a slope. And if they wipe out from 15 feet above the ground, it's going to hurt. They may break a lot of bones and terrible things can happen. The youngster is inexperienced he fell on his first job. Yes, we have ski jumping, in fact, to thank for this ridiculous crash on the classic intro for ABC's wide world of sports.

Which actually explains the famous line, The thrill of victory, And the agony of defeat. And the agony of defeat. If I may give a suggestion to ski jumping, you got to come up with a more dramatic name for what is happening here. You watch this shit, and it's like a flying squirrel. You're watching these people in this position that I have learned physics has suggested that they embrace.

And they are suborbitaly soaring in a fashion that I did not respect sufficiently until I started watching these videos. It's about the closest, I think, a human gets to flying because it's not like hang gliding where, you know, you have something big attached to you. Right. It's not like skydiving where the parachute comes out. Ski flying? Can we come up with like ski soaring, ski? Well, I think there is a ski flying. Is there?

Yeah, I think there is something. I have a lot to learn about this. They go off really, really big jumps. And that's really long distance. Bodies sailing? At least I've heard that terminology. But yes, this is more than just your average, you know, quote unquote, ski jump. Showtime on the ski jumping hill in the man.

Mountains of Zhang Zhaku, who will bring it in Beijing. Linvik, 135 meters. This is Beijing 2022. This is the gold medalist, Matt. Please introduce us to this gentleman as he takes off. This is Marius Lindvik. He's Norwegian. He's basically the best ski jumper in the world.

Oh, he's absolutely nailed it, Lindvik. It's a couple of observations, as I. I watched this closely. He's like the angle, right? It seems like he's both vertical and horizontal at the same time. There is like an optical illusion thing that you're describing.

And also, what he's wearing, they're not pants because it's a suit, but there is a fabric fluttering here around his bottom half. Yeah, that's a jumping suit. When you see ski jumpers walking around, in some sense, it's like something approaching.

I'm going to date myself a little bit here. but like David Burns suit. Oh, yeah. It's not making sense. It's something like that. The physics of it, right? It's very simplistic. There's a sail kind of dynamic.

You put a fairly big cloth on these bodies and the wind catches it. You don't want any drag. You want your body to be in great position and you want to have a smooth material and you want lift. do you want the air to really catch as much of that sale, so to speak, as possible? This is, though, not to be a drag.

This has not seemed to be a super popular sport across the world. No. And so the cradle of this sport is where? Is sort of northern and central Europe. There may be a couple others there, but, you know, it's not a particularly accessible sport. And, you know, for that reason, it hasn't been historically that popular. But where they do it and where it is popular, it's really popular.

And in fact, he didn't know until Thursday afternoon he would be making this run in front of 40,000 fellow Norwegians. 94, Lilihammer, in Norway. It's like, you know, Brazil hosting the World Cup. Absolutely. Yeah, when you watch the opening ceremony, you actually see a dude carrying the Olympic torch on a ski jump. Magnificent. A little bit shaky, but he's down to the cheers.

And ski jumping was invented here in Norway 100 years ago, so there's no finer way to bring the Olympic torch into the stadium. So many of the sports in the Olympic Games are what we refer to as Nordic sports. Indeed. He said he wasn't nervous. It was just another day at the office. but I don't believe it. Nordic is in the country name, Norway.

A person who only knows about Norway through stereotypes is kind of imagining this. It's basically Mardi Gras. Yes. I mean, it's basically Mardi Gras. This is Norse Mardi Gras. Yeah. You know, this is a party.

There are two jumpers to go. The both of Norway and the crowd can smell blood. In more recent times, as sports has become part of modern life. I mean, there's just these sports. clubs all over Norway and every little town, there's ski clubs. And just about everybody starts out involved in one and stays involved in it. And that's how you get a country of five million people being the all-time leader in Olympic medals and the winter games. Unbelievable. Out of nowhere. So much of the year, you know, it's really cold, it's really dark.

And yet there is this culture of waking up and getting your ass outside, no matter how cold it is, and going and doing something athletic and adventurous in the snow. You got one of the national legends that's been Bredesen, who wins the competition, and then you have Lace Adison, who's another huge figure. And there is a new young star as well to go alongside the old hand Bredison, Orterson and Bennisin Walk together Very proudly in front of their nation now.

Silver medalist. In the sports, silver medalist in ski jumping in 1994 in Lillahommer, which is about as good as it gets. You know, you win a medal in one of your country's national sports on home snow.

Oh yeah, Lassay Addison, who I hope is better at ski jumping than he is high-fiving. That was, you know, not the most. This was early generation high-five. I think, you know, you go back to 94. Reading on a curve, it took a bit to get to Norway, maybe.

In fairness to Lace Adison, Norwegian ski jumping legend. Right. Right. You know, was Norway's day, and in particular, that of the young man, autism, and the veteran campaigner Redison. They really ruled today. But speaking of Norwegian enthusiasm, you are not there, Matt. You were not there on the mountain at 94. So we wanted to reach out to somebody who was.

And so we reached out to a Norwegian ski jumping insider. And I want to clarify, this is not like, you know, the Adam Schaefter of ski jumping, although that would be a funny person to exist. This guy, I'm going to let you introduce him. Who is this man? Well, let's call him Eric. My name is Eric Rune Sandoy. It sounds like a Norwegian name than this.

I am 70 years old. and we'll let him introduce himself. I was on the Olympics in Lillehammer, and I lived in Oslo then, and I remember, 0.3.30 in the morning, I got up, we took the bus down to the train station. It's two hour with trains, and then we were up in the hills around 6.30,

and it was alive from that moment until we went home, I think about 3rd, late night. It was fantastic. Yeah, listening to this guide talk, there is a religiosity, I dare say, to his description.

This is kind of a holy national sport for us. This has been like a kind of folklore, a very proud tradition for the Norwegians because we have so many good jumpers that have won gold medals and World Championship and in Olympics and everything. And listening to him there, Matt, I mean, I'm looking at the statistics, and we're talking all-time 12 ski-jumping Olympic Golds, 36 medals total.

That's the most ever. And then, you know, they just won the most recent thing was the World Championships. Yeah, they have, but they're not as dominant as they used to be. It makes me want to just compare and contrast. whatever the American competitive ideology is around sports to the Norwegian attitude. How would you summarize that? So I sort of think of the American idea of competition

as win at just about every cost. You would talk about somebody in America as being really driven and being really ambitious and being really competitive. And those would be compliments. in Norway those are kind of like insults you mean naked desperation to win

is not a virtue no you're supposed to win you're supposed to want to win but it's not supposed to look like you want to win you know you're supposed to look like it's just a part of your life and this is what you do you know fair play is very important

humility is really really important you just don't want to do too much peacocking end zone dances would not be a big thing. It's just sort of a completely different way of going about sports. And that leaks all the way down to the junior level. I've mentioned before that there are these sports clubs

and all the kids are involved with them. But it's really important to the Norwegians that they stay pretty unsurious and pretty uncompetitive until the kids are pretty much teenagers. If you just, you know, nakedly from the time you were five years old, singularly went after this one thing, that would like not be cool. It reminds me if I can be now psychologically geopolitical for a second. It reminds me of one of the things that I found in the research for this, which is that Norway, as you might imagine, does have the highest electric car adoption rate on the planet. It's like 96%.

And simultaneously, beneath that snowy surface, the economy is built on oil money. It is now. Yeah, from like the natural gas supply export. Right. It is a land of contradictions. I think like most lands is what we have figured out in the modern world and what we're more honest about these days.

People drive nice cars there. It's beautiful. Everyone seems to have a country house. Yes, health care and country houses built atop oil reserves. Right. So there is both, you know, happiness and celebration. and enjoyment of all this stuff. And enthusiastic high-fiving.

Yes, enthusiastic high-fiving, but also a good bit of guilt. All of which brings us back, I think, to this notion that ski jumping, as much as it is, this thing that Norway has dominated, remains this game of inches, especially when it comes to the technical engineering of the sport. Yes. You are using every little edge. And like we've seen in the last, say, 20 years, In baseball, for instance, the edges become harder and harder and harder to find.

And I mean, I think if we could go back to, you know, our Norwegian friend, Eric, what he says is around 2012, 2015 or so, he started to see sort of a change in the culture. The kind of development that we saw all this year was the way of how can we get a little better. the battle of millimeters and the battle of the grams. I think one thing is the equipment where they tried, is it possible to get the suit a little bigger? Maybe we fly 10 centimeters longer. Is it possible to get the bindings a little bit forward as all these things?

If the drag increases by 1%, then the length of a jump goes down by more than a meter. That's a lot. By the same token, if you can increase the lift that we talked about by just 1%, then the jump goes up by nearly two meters. That's where you get the scientists into it. And this becomes more than just a bunch of guys drinking beer and going flying off a ski jump and seeing how far they can go.

But now I think what Eric was reflecting on is what happens when that very male experience becomes an even more male. experience of a bunch of dudes trying to figure out how can we make ourselves bigger down there? Yeah. Well, maybe not make the anatomy bigger, but make the stuff around the anatomy bigger. Yeah, it's a very important distinction. We're talking about a penis parachute, not the actual penis. It was so shameless, obviously, that they have really passed the border for what's normal and not normal.

I just need to be very clear about this for both legal and journalistic reasons. Before you go ski jumping at the highest level, there is, in fact, a meeting with a crotch inspector. Basically, he's inspecting lots of things, but one of the things they inspect is the dimensions of every part of your body. Because there's an opportunity to create what we would refer to,

In family language, there's a larger inseam. That's the New York Times Company's approved description. Right, and that'll give you more a lift. And in fact, in case you think this is a purely abstract premise, we do helpfully have a video of Inspector Crotch. How has it always gone this way? Okay, I'm not as you find the picture. What is Inspector Crotch's real name, Matt?

That is Lace Utsin, who we really... recently saw giving one of the greatest high-fives in the history of sport. He, in his post-jumping life, has become one of the most respected Nordic sports officials. He is the director of Nordic Combined for FISP, the International Skiing Federation, which is the Federation Internacional du Ski. and he generously volunteered to demonstrate how this gets a 3D model of all of its athletes' dimensions. And for those who we are not watching on YouTube, you've made a horrible mistake because this is, in fact, a regency jumping legend, Lace Utsin, shirtless and only wearing his underwear. And he is now bald, and he is in great shape, objectively.

and both his left hand and right hand are gripping the sort of like supports on what appear to be a vertical rotissary which is rotating endlessly 360 degrees. What they're doing is they're getting, you know, a 3D model of him so that they can get his precise dimensions and from those precise dimensions, they can regulate how big a suit he can actually wear. And I love that we asked for this video and they gave it to us.

It is a very invasive fact-checking process. If you're going to be a ski jumper, you're going to bear it all, and you're going to get measured. It's a literal d-measuring contest. Yeah, that's out there now, I guess. You've put it out there. You know, you are a Pulitzer Prize winner, and I assign you. Well, I was part of a team, just to make sure I don't want to big myself up too much. Well, on this team, on the Pablo Tore finds out team, you're supposed to ask a very hard question.

Is it embarrassing the way they get measured for the suits? Is it awkward? I assume that you're referring to the crotch area of the suit, which is the area that has the most influence in terms of the suit. What Lasse told us was the reason they're getting this 3D model is because there's a very specific rule that the suit can only be forced. centimeters larger than your body's surface area? So we're measuring the whole body. How big is it?

You know, how the circumference of your legs, of your upper body, of your arms, and everything, so that we have that on file with everyone. And we're measuring the athletes. We're measuring the athletes with the suit on and with the suit off to see that this is correlated to the 3D measurements that we have done earlier. and specifically we have a tool created to measure the crutch measurement of all the athletes, which we're doing before the jump and after the jump. You mentioned the word circumference.

Are you talking about the circumference of the legs? What exactly are we? It's the circumference of the legs, yes. So right leg, left leg. The middle one were not measuring for the male athletes. Okay, got it, got it. Thank you for that clarification. Yeah, I'm not going to even comment on, you know, I thought it was girth, but we'll go with what he decided.

You got to ask the really hard questions in this business. As an investigative reporter, we will settle for nothing less. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to Norway, to Trondheim, to the Nordic Ski World Championships and the first medal opportunity for the best ski jumping men in the world on the normal hill. So now it's March 2025, Matt. We're at the World Ski Championships, which we alluded to before. So at the start, what happens is that the Norwegian National Ski Jumping Team starts off feeling the thrill of victory. They get three golds, three bronzes, and their superstar, Marius Lindvik.

Lindvig has matched Walinger's distance. Dominates the normal hill. Then, as the weekend arrives, March 7th, it's the main event. Good afternoon. everyone, welcome to Norway, to Trondheim, and to the Big Hill. And here, Marius Lindvik, defending Olympic gold medalist, the winner of the qualification, two gold medals and a bronze medal in his kit bag already. He's in second place, at the moment, through the first round of jumps, with another shot at gold.

It's been a fantastic championship, and I think everyone was extremely happy about how, you know, we've had full house, spectators. We've had very, very exciting events. But in the middle of all of this, Matt, with Inspector Kroch himself in attendance, everyone's attention turns somewhere else. Firstly, I heard some rumors that some National Federations were making a protest. I mean, there was a lot of rumors back and forth. And then we also saw that, you know, this video that was set out, it was public. Someone had video taped something. And you're not saying that...

There's a video that a whistleblower releases. And this video, it's no exaggeration to say that this is taking us behind a curtain. Because it's literally taking us behind a curtain. And so what we can see now, Matt, what the world can see now, is Norway's equipment manager, as this guy, secretly fondling crotch foam.

while his boss, who's the head coach of the storied Norwegian national team we've been talking about, is directly supervising the foam. This, by the way, long after each of the two suits that they're altering on this video, have been measured by Inspector Crotch. Yeah, I mean, we talked about drag before. I mean, they're trying to make the surface of the suit as smooth as possible, and they're trying to increase the lift by, you know, making it sort of solid so it really can hold the air.

And so I just got to be clear, I do believe this is the only cheating scandal I have ever covered or seen that involves an actual sewing machine, which is right there. You can see that as well. And yes, this is Team Norway using reinforced thread to stitch this extra bulge,

which tears the rulebook apart. All of this happened. Apparently sometime between 10 p.m. and after midnight, the night before the race. Isn't it great that it happened sometime between 10 p.m. and midnight? It is. I mean, it's like the water gate break. It's just great.

It would be so much less interesting if it was 3.30 the afternoon while they were getting a coffee or something like that. There is the most obvious deep throat joke here that I also will just leave to the side. Do you know about the Zabruder tape from the Kennedy assassination? Is this video like the Zabruder video of ski jumping? Well, I mean, it's, I wouldn't say that those two, let's say, cases can be similar. I mean, I think the Kennedy case is a world-known thing. And even though ski dumping would like to be, you know, global and world famous, but for sure,

there's a certain thing to that tape that, of course, makes it different than, than anything else. I don't want to compare it necessarily to doping because doping is a different thing that brings the health of an athlete into it. And the main reason you can't dope is because that gives me an advantage. And unless you do something that is likely harmful to your body, you're not going to be able to compete with me. So that's different. At the same time, I sort of feel like this is as if we had a kidney. camera in Lance Armstrong's

team's blood bank essentially and they were getting blood transfusions before and during the Tour de France and if someone had had a camera in there and shot them like with their arms out, getting the blood out of the refrigerator

this is sort of what we're seeing. It's something that you really never see in sports and suddenly it's like there. And much like the dope big scandals, reference, it involves the highly problematic use of needles. There you go. It's just hard not to compare this to deflate gate.

The last time there was a massive equipment-related scandal, of course, the opposite sort of a scandal in which their ball became smaller. Yeah, right? Isn't that the irony? Tom Brady. Isn't that the irony of ironies? But yes, the New England Patriots deflating the balls a little bit so that Tom Grady could grip them a little better in cold weather and bad weather.

and text messages on his phone, which he ultimately took a hammer to in one of the great... I forgot about that hammer. In one of the great references in any investigation. We tried to get the phone, but Mr. Brady destroyed the phone

with a hammer or something like that. You know what? On the list of things I loved out deflategate, I had the deflator being the nickname of the guy doing the deflating. I had Bill Belichick having to talk about the ideal gas law. And I forgot about Tom Brady

destroying his own phone with a hammer. Yeah. You think there were some pictures on that phone that he didn't want to go public? I would love to find out. In this case, this blew up the world championships. It absolutely blew up the world championships because the world championships are in Norway. Norway is doing really well, but it breaks in the middle of everything. And so the reigning Olympic gold medalist, Marius Lindvik, Norway's hero, who again was in second place through just the first round, gets disqualified. for meddling in this event, as does his teammate,

who was wearing the other illicitly altered suit. But the thing I want to mention here is that Marius Lindvik actively refused to feel the agony of defeat. And he leads. That's almost 140. He is on fire. In fact, he decided to jump anyway. Perhaps because, to quote,

another guy wearing a suit, That was way too big. I don't care how impossible it seems. And in this case, we, after two, three different kind of tests that we did, we saw that there was something in the crutch area that was not supposed to be like it felt like or how it looked. A very chaotic day, that's for sure. I've never seen anything like it before.

and of course needed to bring that on to our system and into our ethics department and make sure that it was handled in a professional and good way when we saw something like this going on. And in this case, given the geopolitical context, kind of like the Norwegian nightmare. Total nightmare also. And that's the other wrinkle in it is because this absolutely horrifies Norwegians.

It sort of cuts to the core of who they are. You know, what we spoke about before is that, like, it's great to win, but you're not supposed to want to win that badly. It's not supposed to be that important. And, you know, to cheat like this. And it is, you know, just cheating. It's breaking the rules. To do it this way and then to get caught is just a real sort of national.

shame. What's going on in Norway, the Cheeto of Scandinavia? Ski-jumping Norwegians admitted to cheating by using manipulated jumpsuits with a reinforced thread. And? The International Ski and Snowboard Federation have opened an investigation. We still have many unanswered questions we must get to the bottom of. This incident will have consequences. If you seize the suits as it investigates, leaving the fate of the team hanging by a thread. That's the evening news. I'm John Dickerson. I'm Maurice Dubois.

Norway isn't in the international news that much. And so when this cuts through, like, on television, and it turns out the penis parachute is real. It turns out the Battle of the Bulge has been waged by the head coach himself. What was the reaction like behind the scenes? I think there's a general thinking now that, like, we've pretty much lost a sense of shame in the world. Like, people just do shit.

And, you know, if they get caught, they get caught, they shrug their shoulders, they move on. And they try and, you know, make a TikTok video and resuscitate their reputation, become influencers, whatever. You know, they figure it out. I mean, even the Russians in 2014, like, they never, like, really issued a huge apology for constructing a building to pass dirty and clean urine through secret passageways. They just sort of shrug their shoulders and were like, yeah, okay, you guys cheat too. That's not how it goes in Norway. Like, this is sort of a national reckoning on how could this possibly have happened? How could we possibly do this?

And the guy at the center of it, the coach, you know, Magnus Breiv, pretty much immediately falls on his sword. Quote, it was a deliberate act. And consequently, it's cheating. I definitely should have stopped it as head coach, end quote. And so these documents in front of us, Matt, these are fresh off our printer because, as we described, the head coach has fallen on his sword, but much like the crotch inspector's 360-degree rotation of an issue,

there was a further, deeper investigation that took place. And this, I'll read the headline, notice of charge to the FIS Ethics Committee concerning a violation of the FIS rules on the prevention of manipulation of competitions and the FIS Universal Code of Ethics, and this was published in August of 2025 and obtained by us just yesterday. You're basically holding an explanation of the findings of a rather secret investigative report that only a handful of people at FIS have even reviewed.

It has a code name. Crotchgate is not the code name, in fact, code name Project Pine. Yeah, I don't want to comment on the wood involves. Neither of us will be because we're too classy. Right, exactly. Right, exactly. Right, exactly.

Looking through this, and I just need your help in establishing, what did these investigators find out? What they had to do is they had to sort of raise this to the highest level and bring in, you know, some independent people. because this all reflects very badly on FIS itself, they knew immediately that they were going to be called into question in terms of their inspection processes and they didn't want to be accused of sort of washing this all away

and making it go away because it would make their competitions and their athletes look bad and make their sport look like it was rightfully cheating. The question is how far beyond the sort of usual pushing the envelope does this go? And what they find out is that this really is sort of an unprecedented level of cheating. It's not simply just kind of a salacious video of, you know, we got you. What we got you doing was something that really is unlike the garden variety messing around with the suits that has happened in the past. But in any good investigation into a cheating scandal,

there is the question of who knew what and when. Right. What did the president know? And when did he know it? As they said in a certain darkened garage, was the coaching staff that we saw? Were they acting alone? What was the, did the athletes know?

So the athletes claim they didn't know. And the coaches have said that the athletes didn't know. and the investigators have accepted those explanations for the most part. I mean, the athletes did receive some very, very light penalties. So what does that mean that they got light penalties? So the athletes received some very light penalty suspensions of a couple months that they were able to serve during the summer, basically. You know, this is sort of like,

Igish Fiantek, the former world number one tennis player, getting suspended for allegedly doping, not intentionally, and getting a suspension that she served during December. It's kind of like a starting pitcher getting suspended games that he's not pitching. Yeah, if you've got a four-day suspension as a starting pitcher, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, they've got very light suspensions. According to the investigative report, quote, according to the accounts of the key coaches and athletes concerned,

the athletes were apparently not informed of the alterations and did not test the jumping suits. If true, this is not only surprising but also risky and irresponsible towards the ski jumpers, given that these changes are likely to affect flight characteristics

and therefore the safety of the athletes. Which is a funny other concern to bring up that, like, whoa, if you didn't know, maybe you should have wanted to know given how like your whole, you know, body flying through the air off a 20-story, how many stories is it? The tower is, you know, a...

About 25 stories, depending on the jump, somewhere between 20 and 30 stories. And keep in mind, it's also that tower is at the top of a mountain. Right. So it's really, you're really high. You're really high and you're going really fast. I think I'd want to know. By the way, like, these Norwegian ski jumpers, they're going to be in the Olympics. The coaches and the equipment manager have been made the fall guys for this.

Well, so now we get to the brass hacks of this, right? which is, without imputing too much motive, given that we cannot read the minds of these people, the incentive structure is worth outlining, which is that the coaches, who we met for the first time behind that curtain on that video, yes, they are being punished, the equipment manager is being punished.

But the actual, the stars, the guys you'll be seeing on TV when you watch the Olympics, within weeks, it seems like the product, the celebrity, the actual, you know, potential upside here for the sport and for the country, that is being protected. Yeah, Tom Brady was back for the playoffs, wasn't he? Right?

I mean, isn't that sort of what always happens in sports? Except in rare cases, you sort of find your scapegoats and make them the really bad guys. And that is one of the reasons that Fist believes that they should, you know, get a really severe penalty with an 18-month suspension. And in fact, you know, what the confidential investigative reports appears to have found is that, yes, they are paying a huge price because it was caught on tape. Because they were caught on tape, they were responsible for a huge damage to the reputation of a sport. Yes, this is a 31-page 68-point formal ruling that got handed down last Thursday on letterhead. And it reads the independent experts, and the Ethics Committee here ultimately upholds the 18-month suspensions for the coach and for the sewing machine guy.

And the panel also claims that it is, quote, unconvinced that FIS would have mitigated the sanctions if there had not been publicity surrounding the video, declaring, quote, now is indeed the time to put down a clear marker as to what is not acceptable in the international winter sport of ski jumping. End quote. we've talked a lot here about how this is a very Norwegian story and there's a very exotic northern European aspect to it that sounds pretty American like the biggest problem actually is that all you people talked about it and now we've got to do something about it the biggest problem in fact is PR right you made us look bad how dare you

how dare you make us look bad for the lax way in which we were doing our jobs How dare you make us look smaller than we want to be? Exactly. It's in some ways a unique scandal. In other ways, it's just like all the rest of them. Yeah. Matt Futterman, thank you for investigating a story that is more familiar than I think any of us, frankly, would like to admit.

Pretty familiar. For a lot more on this story, we do encourage you to read our colleague Matt Futterman's exhaustively reported piece in The Athletic is out right now. This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metal Arc Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.