Pablo Torre Finds Out - The Paralympics Has a Massive Cheating Problem

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

When the Paralympics begin in Paris on Aug. 28, there will be no shortage of feel-good storylines. But two whistleblowers tell Pablo Torre Finds Out a very different story: about how widespread cheating has destroyed the integrity of the Games themselves. Paralympians are allegedly manipulating the system by exaggerating their impairments, lying to classifiers, and tanking tests — a fraud known as “classification doping.” But one athlete has decided, at long last, to fight this problem in court. American handcyclist David Berling sits down with PTFO correspondent Tim Rohan for an exclusive interview about the lawsuit that might change everything. 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. I was appalled and horrified that people would want to do that. Why would you want to do that? Right after this ad. You're listening to Draft King's Network. Tim, Rohan, I love it when you come into studio because it means we're about to investigate some stuff. Yeah, thanks for having me, Pablo. This one, this investigation, I do want to sort of provide some backdrop for it. Because I'm a person who's generally pretty numb to corruption, to cheating.

We've done Olympic match-fixing scandals. We've done alleged mortgage fraud. We've done stat inflation in the NBA. All those stories have made me sort of just elephant skin towards most things. This one, though, has gotten to me. Yeah. The story, the headline, is about cheating at the Paralympics. You called it a doozy.

Yeah, this one was a dozy. The very first thing that I just need you to know about the Paralympics is that they are the most feel-good event of the entire global sports calendar. And I don't think that race is particularly close. The Paralympics celebrate athletes who have all overcome a wide range of disabilities and impairments. And each of these individuals, in their own way, is incredibly impressive. Since 2008, the Paralympics have been held in the same host city as the Olympics, just weeks after the Olympic closing ceremony, which means that later this month in Paris, the Paralympians will all get to compete in the same venues as the Olympians, which is a phenomenal premise. But the reason I asked our favorite long-haired investigative journalist, Tim Rohan, to spend months of his life helping us report today's episode is because this story,

is about what this event does not want you to know. And the scandal that first made me want to dive into the world of cheating at the Paralympics was a strange one. The scandal that opened my eyes to this issue in the first place sounded more like an absurd real-life version of a Johnny Knoxville movie, set in Europe. Arguably, the biggest scandal in Paralympics history happened at the 2000 Paralympics when the Spanish basketball team won the gold medal. And it turned out that one of the

members of the team happened to be a journalist. And after the Paralympics ended, he wrote this expose revealing that 10 of the 12 members of this team did not, in fact, have intellectual disabilities as they had claimed. In order to qualify as a participant in the intellectual disability basketball event, a prospective player is required to complete a litany of mental tests. to determine their eligibility. The competitor must be determined to have an IQ of no more than 75, so these 10 guys had to purposely fail

a series of intelligence tests and make it look authentic. There were two members of the team that did have IQ below what was required, but 10, 10 of the 12 athletes did not. During their first match, the team played so well against their disabled opponents

that they were up 30 points by halftime. At that point, their coach told them to slow down and let the other team shoot more. And it turned out that this went to the top that a high-ranking member of the Spanish Paralympic Committee had basically orchestrated this plan to recruit people who did not have intellectual disabilities

to play for this team. And so after this happens, there's a ban for the 2004 and 2008 Paralympics that no athletes who had intellectual disabilities were allowed to compete as the Paralympics basically try to figure out what to do here. I mean, just all over the world,

It sounds so profoundly fucked up. Yeah. On every level on like how do you do it? Why do you do it? The motive for people who get off on defrauding the Paralympics, it is something that I immediately was like, I want to understand how this story came to be. And so where does our investigation take us today, Tim? Well, it turns out the Spanish Paralympic scandal was just the tip of the iceberg.

And right now, current, present day, there is a lawsuit, an American. athlete suing the IPC, the International Paralympic Committee in German court over this very issue, over cheating at the Paralympics. So not only does it appear that the cheating has continued on, it's gotten worse. And at stake here is essentially whether the Paralympics can be held, what the Paralympics look like going forward, and also the integrity of the games itself. Right. What at stake, in other words, for the Paralympics is everything. Everything. So Tim, a recurring theme whenever I have you on assignment is that people refuse to talk to you. Yeah. Why is that? I mean, people don't like me? What do you think?

I feel like your hair is intimidating. Number one. But for this one, it sounds like you actually had kind of a different experience, which I am very hardened to hear about. Yeah, this is an issue that a lot of Paralympians and people in the Paralympic community are very passionate about. And so there were lots of people who were willing to talk. And our tour guide into the story, today is an American Paralympian named David Burling. I joined the Air Force and got stationed at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Arizona there. I interviewed him multiple times over multiple months. You know, the first thing you need to know about David is in the early 2000s when he was in his

20s, he joined the Air Force. As he starts going through training, they're doing dogfighting exercises. And as David's going through this, he keeps puking. He can't get through the drill, it seems, without vomiting. He wanted to be a pilot, but now he's given another job in the Air Force, and he's now based in Southern California working for a division of the Air Force that is working on spy satellites. And so every week, David is now commuting from Arizona to Southern California, and he has his private pilots license, and he's going back and forth in a plane.

And one day in 2007, David is flying into Southern California and there's some fog. That day, his landing gear hits a power line. And David crashes into a vacant field at about 150 miles per hour, nose first. So because the plane landed nose first, it pushed the engine through the fuselage and through my legs. when I was at the hospital, the first thing they did was amputate straight through my knees as a life-saving measure. I had plates on both of my femurs, and they were just trying to keep it from getting infected. It was just a process of sheer will. And during the recovery process, a few years after the crash, the Department of Veteran Affairs gives David a hand cycle, this piece of equipment.

that is supposed to help David with his cardiovascular health. Right. So explain this for people have not seen a hand cycle before. So a hand cycle is maybe what you might imagine it to be. David's sitting down in this bike and it's three wheels and he's using his hands the pedal. Right. And he starts riding around his neighborhood and then he starts entering competitive races. And so by 2017, 10 years after his crash, David is competing at international events. And David, it turns out, is pretty good at this, a multiple top 10 finishes at World Cup

events. He becomes a member of the U.S. Paralympic parapsychling team, which involves getting coaching and getting equipment and a stipend. He makes a goal for himself that he wants to compete at the Paralympics. Right. The pinnacle for any such athlete. But for some reason, he can't quite get over the hump. You know, he's doing well in these international competitions. He's on. He's on. the team, but he can't get a spot in the Paralympics. And what he comes to find is, you know, there's something fishy happening in his sport. We'd get done with races in my classification and guys would literally get up out of their bike and either, you know, walk away or somebody would hand them a below the knee prosthesis.

They'd pop it on and walk away. And as a double above knee amputee, you just, you can't do that. The paralyzation levels were so minimal that guys could walk easily. And then to podiums, they're walking up and down steeper amps without assistance. Which is all to say that David is competing against people that should not be in the same category as him. As a double amputee, he has a different, more severe impairment is what he's saying. year. Exactly. David is a double amputee. His legs were amputated through the knee. And now he finds himself competing against single-legged amputees who also have their amputations below the knee.

So they have both their knees. And also people who, as David would describe them, have, quote, minor paralysis. You will see people doing different sports, different cross-training, different activities out on their social media. And then you will see them at competitions using canes or orthotics or, you know, support braces and things like that that they were not using their activities and shouldn't have any reason to use whatsoever. And so these are the people that now David finds us his competition in these races. There's a rule within our guidelines that you have to have your leg strapped down. And a lot of these guys, when they had both their knees, they were getting up on their

knees in their bike and actually peddling almost like you would see an able-bodied person over the top of a bike pump. And so they're being able to put off power that there's no way that somebody like me a double above the knee amputee can even generate. So how do these people all end up in the same class as David then? As David is realizing, wait a minute, this is not fair for us to be all in the same division. In order to understand that, you have to understand this process called classification. You're bringing together athletes from around the world who have a wide array of disabilities and impairments, right?

If you had a different competition for every single different impairment or disability, it would be unwieldy. So to make the Paralympics more manageable, they organize athletes into classes. So practicality is governing a sort of inelegant, but with the idea of fairness, system of categorization. You are being evaluated by your capability. You're being evaluated by your impairment. to figure out which classification, which class you belong in, which athletes you should be competing against in order to ensure that there's a fair competition for everyone. Yeah, I'm looking at the paraclycling divisions here, Tim,

the 13 sport classes on the website, and they're labeled like C-1-5 and H-1-2 and all of these sort of complicated labels. And so if you're trying to cheat this whole system, how do you do that? So when the athletes are coming in to fit, figure out which classes they're going to be placed in, they're evaluated by someone called a classifier. And a classifier is essentially a volunteer. And they could have a medical background. They could be a doctor or a physical therapist. Or they could have a technical background and be a coach within this sport. The athlete goes through a series of tests, basically with these classifiers

evaluating them and ultimately deciding which class they belong in. And one of the first steps is the athlete provides a doctor's note. They provide some medical record stating their impairment and their disability. But according to David, it's possible for athletes to manipulate that documentation. I believe that athletes will go to doctors and try to get doctors' notes that either exaggerate their injuries

or possibly document the possibility of an injury. And they will take that to the classifiers or send that ahead of time, ahead of their classification appointment, and they will include that in their record. And the classifiers, I don't think, question the doctors that do the evaluation on the athlete. Hey, look, Tim,

as somebody who may or may not have claimed back pain to get a medical marijuana card in L.A. maybe a decade ago, I understand how this process works. That sounds pretty simple in terms of cheating at the Paralympics. Yeah, and then it goes beyond that because then at a certain point, the athlete has to go through an in-perioder.

an exam in front of the team of classifiers, where they poke and prod you and, you know, take a look. And the point of that is to see kind of the extent of your impairment and how it relates to the sport you're about to participate in. And then also the classifiers watch as the athlete performs the sport. So just a key detail about all of this, though, is that it sounds like if you're trying to cheat all of this, you are trying to tank these auditions. There's been reports in The Guardian in Sports Illustrated in Australian media. There was an IPC report a few years ago in which more than 100 Paralympic athletes and officials

spoke out about issues with the system. And what they described is athletes are intentionally misrepresenting their disabilities during these tests. And that can manifest in a number of different ways. One of the ways they'll intentionally fatigue themselves before the classification test. Or... As in like they'll get real tired physically.

Exactly. They'll go through a strenuous workout immediately before the classification test so that when they are going through the test, they are... So this is like the anti-NFL combine. They're trying to be as bad as possible and they're trying to sabotage themselves.

But not only that, one egregious example that was reported was athletes actually taking valium, the muscle relaxant before the classification test. What they're doing, In short, they're trying to tank the test so that they are placed into a lower classification against other athletes who have more severe impairments than they do.

So it's easier to win medals potentially. Exactly. That's fucking wild. But just in case you think that all of this classification stuff we've discussed is rock bottom unethical, just know that it gets even worse. Because an athlete taking a performance, diminishing drug, a sort of inverse steroid, is certainly a problem, a problem that I didn't even

know existed until reporting this episode. But it's also the first step. And in David Burling's experience, this level of dishonesty, this sheer willingness to cheat, turns out to be a kind of degenerative condition of its own. There's also something called reclassification, where an athlete, maybe you're competing in a class, you can apply to get classified again to move classes. And if you think about it, there's a logical reason for that. Because if you have an impairment that's degenerative, it's going to get worse over time. And so you perhaps shouldn't be competing in the same class throughout your whole Paralympic career. But as David points out, athletes will use reclassification to their advantage to cheat the system. What we're seeing is people going to the doctor and saying,

okay, could there be detriment in my back? Could there be detriment in my knee? Could I have nerve damage here? And so if a doctor can write it up and that athlete can take that to a classification appointment, then they might be able to get reclassified down, even though their impairment has not changed whatsoever. I'd say over the last three to four years, guys who have won world champion, in one class will move down to the next class.

And then there's just absolutely no chance for the athletes in that class to be able to be competitive. There's a guy in David's class who's winning races by five minutes, Pablo. Right, they get to be Katie Ledecki. It's gotten to the point where there's animosity between the athletes, obviously, as you can imagine.

How does that express itself in the Paralympics, which is, again, meant to be a feel-good television show. There's been athletes that have staged protests. And in David's sport, parapscling, there was a protest just this year at the World Cup in Italy. Shortly before that World Cup, there had been an athlete that had been reclassified into this division. And the other athletes in this class got together and said,

we're going to protest this. What they ended up doing was they started the race and they rode for about 20, 25 meters, and then they all stopped. The one rider who had recently been reclassified kept on riding. Yeah, no, in a sense, this is like mob justice. I mean, it might be righteous mob justice,

but this is the athletes taking this all into their own hands. Yeah, and it's gotten so bad that it got the attention of UCI, the International Federation that kind of governs parapsiccling. Due to classification doping or classification, manipulation, there is definitely an animosity between the athletes. It's the difference between the haves and have-nots. The biggest issue that we've seen, actually, it was out of the last World Cup in Belgium. UCI sent out a communicate to all the athletes and all the national

federations stating that there will be no bullying or, you know, questioning of athletes who were moved to classifications because there will be backlash from the UCI and there will be punishment. And so the fact that the UCI has gone that far to say, you will not question us or we will punish you is just unbelievable in my mind. And the reason David feels so strongly about this, you're the emotion in his voice, is because he is the type of person who is getting hurt the most here, right? The people who are getting hurt the most are the people with the most severe impairments, with the most serious disabilities, because people are reclassifying and coming into their class and then wiping the floor with them

and winning the medals and in the end, essentially, pushing them out of the sport because they don't really stand a chance anymore. And so the question then becomes, who are the people who are making these decisions and why are they getting away with enabling a giant cheating corruption scandal? It starts with the classifiers, as we mentioned earlier. And lucky for you and me,

we got a classifier to talk to us. And she is just as pissed off as David is. So Tim, I didn't know about this job before we started working on this episode together. and now I need to know everything about what it is to be a classifier. Who becomes this? Who did you talk to? I talked to Jane Buckley.

She lives in Australia and she has been around the Paralympics going back to the 80s. And she started out as a physiotherapist and then eventually started working as a classifier. Well, Tim, I didn't sit out to become a Paralympic classifier. Trust me. Jane worked as a classifier for about 20 years. She actually served as something called the Chief Classifier at two Paralympic Games in 2004 and 2008. One thing that stood out from what Jane told me was that this cheating at the Paralympics has been going on, going back to the 1980s when Chief first got involved. The first time I heard about athletes misrepresenting themselves was, I think, at the very first games I ever attended nationally in Australia.

and that was back in 1984. And it was just this known phenomena where people would exaggerate their disability just to get a more favourable class. When I travelled with the visually impaired back in 1984, I remember athletes having a bit of a laugh about, oh, the fact that it was really easy to say you can't see something when asked to look at something on a lot.

an eye chart. I was appalled and horrified that people would want to do that. Why would you want to do that? No, this is getting now to the heart of it. Tim, what did you think when you were hearing Jane

explain the strategies for fraud here? Well, it actually, it gets worse. Some disabilities are a little bit easier to contrive. So it's like exaggerating movement. So it's not just fatigue. but developing a certain way of moving,

the classic is turning up to classification in a wheelchair or turning up to classification using a walking stick or crutches or something like that when you don't normally do that. Certain medications with certain neurological disabilities, maybe not take them for a few days and allow things to present. a little bit more severe than what they are.

I know of one athlete that actually was encouraged to roll around in some snow, stay outside in the cold, and then present the stiffness, the spasticity that would then ensue from subjecting yourself to an extreme cold environment, to then getting classified you are not going to put your best foot forward in that circumstance. It's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, people, you know, deciding not to take their medication for a couple days before a class, you know, it's just. Right, a wheelchair you don't need. How is this allowed to happen? Is the next question, obviously. So according to the parisport athletes that I spoke to, the classifiers aren't always, they don't always have the most expertise, to put it. But also, I think it's important to remember. These are volunteers, Pablo.

Right. I am. I do want to sort of have some sympathy, I suppose, for an unpaid person who is volunteering to help the Paralympics. And I presume the fact that lots of people are going to try and defraud them would not be a common assumption as I certainly did not assume when I first started hearing about this. Put yourself in the position of a classifier. In order to catch someone who's trying to intentionally misrepresent their disability, you basically have to accuse the athlete of lying about their impairment, which is just such a heavy thing if you think about it. I would say that we have to take people at their words.

You have to be very careful that you don't accuse people that they're misrepresenting. And I also believe, and this is what I used to see in the past, where people would, rather than put it, their classifiers hat on, they would be putting their, oh, this is a person with an impairment or a disability and feeling a bit sorry for them. There's some great actors out there, and even the very best of doctors and best of people can be fooled by people that are very, very good at misrepresenting themselves. What it sounds like the athletes themselves, the individual

athletes, as per that story about them protesting at that race, that David was talking about, they have a sense of this. So what recourse do they have to actually affect change? They don't have any recourse. The athlete as an individual has no opportunity to challenge or protest another athlete's classification decision. By rule. Yeah. But the international federations for the sports.

Right. So in David's case for parac cycling, UCI, this international federation that governs the sport of paracling, they have the opportunity to challenge an athlete's classification. But it's unlikely for that to happen because UCI and these international sport federations are the ones that are in charge of the classification process in the first place when it comes to international competition. And this theme of federations across the Olympics and apparently the Paralympics covering their own ass when it comes to the stuff that they have not been policing is a familiar dynamic.

Yeah, so why would the International Sport Federation challenge its own ruling for classification? But the equivalent of the IOC here is the IPC, and where do they fit into the justice system? So the IPC does have the power to investigate. In 2016, an IPC investigated more than 80 athletes who have been accused of intentionally misrepresenting their disabilities. They apparently didn't find enough evidence to post. punish anyone. So zero of the 80 athletes they investigated. According to the news reports, no one was punished as part of that investigation. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense

because for the IPC, from what Jane Buckley's told me, they don't want the story to be about classification. They want the focus to be on the field, in the pool, on the competition. Another familiar dynamic in parallel to the IOC and how they deal with cheating scandals. I would imagine they would just want this to go away. So while you're building this wonderful narrative that look at what these people have achieved and how inspirational are they, etc., etc., you don't want to start picking holes in the story or the narrative. And just the same as in the Olympics you'll get people that will game the system,

you will have people within the Paralympics that game the system as well but they don't expect to be scrutinized for that they don't expect because you can't possibly understand my disability how dare you also if you think about it the IPC doesn't want to get sued right

and so you can imagine if they accuse someone of intentionally misrepresenting their disability they're opening themselves up to lawsuits And you can imagine the burden of proof in that case to prove that someone is lying about their disability, it just opens up all of these issues that I don't think the IPC wants any part of. Athletes with disabilities are no different than anyone else. Unlike able-bodied athletes that might have the ability to gain advantage by taking performance-enhancing drugs, athletes that have impairments have an extra path to take if they want to enhance their performance.

And that is misrepresenting their ability. This is the classification doping that David Burling was talking you about before. And all of it raises this question of motive because, again, you are defrauding the Paralympics. A key distinction from the Olympics to me when it comes to how I see this story. And so why? Why are so many people doing this, do you think, to this degree? It's all about money. At the 2020 Paralympics, if you were a member of Team USA, if you won a gold medal for Team USA at the 2020 Paralympics, you were reportedly paid almost $38,000 for a gold medal. And for silver medal, you were paid almost $23,000. So I don't know about you, Pablo, but $38,000, it's a lot of money. Right. And not only that, on top of that, it's not just winning the medals, obviously, it's the sponsorships, right?

And it's the equipment and it's the everything that comes with it. Perks. Perks. It comes with being an elite Paralympic athlete. It's just got, I think, a lot more prevalent since there's been more money involved. Way more prevalent. Money, media. They go hand in hand. And the incentivizing of people to move. misrepresent, their ability has just escalated. I mean, Tim, this is bleak.

Like, I'm familiar with, of course, cheaters in the Olympics. But this, because of the shame that I would presume one would feel from cheating in this manner, it just makes me wonder if there's hope for an enterprise like this, if this is this rampant and it's this shameless. Well, I think the hope is that there's people like Jane and David, who, who are now speaking out, right? And I should point out, Jane and David don't know each other. Jane lives in Australia and David lives in Arizona,

and this is just an issue that they're both passionate about. And actually, while Jane was working as a classifier, she actually tried to change the system from the inside. She was a part of a working group that was advising the IPC on classification and how to improve it and how to fix it. But Jane says that the IPC, you know, she made these recommendations as part of this group,

and the IPC didn't take them. And the IPC was just content doing things the way they wanted. No, it sounds like Jane is a whistleblower, Tim. And she was in the literal sense to Pablo, because there was one point during her career where she saw a classification issue happening with an athlete, and she actually ran it up the ladder. She went to her higher-ups and said,

this isn't right, and the whole experience just left a bad taste in her mouth. I stood my ground and I was speaking to people fairly high up within the International Paralympic movement and they were just wanting me to just look away and the conversations got very, very heated. I sarcastically said to one of them, what do you want to do? You want to hand out two gold medals for this event because one of the people really aren't in the right class and one of them would be. And so when that happens to Jane, what does she decide to do?

Where is Jane now in the Paralympic movement? So Jane ultimately decided to leave the Paralympics, in part because she was tired of fighting the higher ups over classification issues. I took the option at the end of 2009 to quit. I just had had enough. You can only fight for so long. And then David Burling, it sounds like, who does not know Jane as you established, comes along years later and says basically that he's experiencing the same exact dynamic that Jane was experiencing.

Exactly. And David also tried to speak up. In 2022, David went to the director of parapsicling for Team USA. And he took the issue up with that person in particular. I had heard grumblings from other athletes. And everybody said there's nothing we can do. There's no process to try and fix this. And so in January of 20, I was at a Paralympic camp for U.S. parapsyching, and I approached our director, and I said, here's what's going on, you see what's going on, how do we fix that? And I pretty much got told that's not our fight and we got to pick our battles. And he also told me, the only way that you're ever going to get anything done is to sue them. And so that's what David does. He sues the IPC in

German court. That lawsuit we were talking about at the beginning, it's David. David's the one who was finally brave enough to take on the IPC and try and change the system for everyone to try and stop this cheating. It's David

who has the chance to upend the Paralympics as we know it. And so we find ourselves, Tim, finally, in German court. Because David Burling has filed this lawsuit, which has the feeling of a potential landmark decision in which he is suing the IPC, and I just want to understand the strategy here. How does one do this? Why is this happening there?

So it's happening in Germany because that's where the IPC is based. And so David, when he decided to do this, had to find himself a German lawyer. And he found a man by the name of Christoph Wichmann. They're arguing that it's illegal for athletes not to have any opportunity here to challenge classification decisions that create an unfair playing field. David Burling is demanding in court that the athletes be the ones who have the power to challenge the classifiers. The athletes themselves have probably more capability to decipher what a athlete actually has as a detriment than the classifiers. classifiers get, let's say, a 45-minute appointment with the athlete. The other athletes race hours against these athletes.

They, you know, they dine with them. They're around them weeks on end and get to see what the capabilities of that athlete truly are. So I want to refer back to some key dates here, Tim, because, of course, the Olympics are over. The opening ceremony of the Paralympics is coming up. August 28th, the closing ceremony of the Paralympics is going to be September 8th. And so resolution on the lawsuit that might change the future of the Paralympics forever is coming when, do we think?

Christoph expects there to be a ruling in mid-September, and he expects the ruling to come down in their favor. Now, if that happens, Christoph expects one of two things to happen. Either the IPC steps up and creates a system in which athletes can, lodge complaints or protests about classification decisions involving other athletes, or the IPC passes the buck and puts it on the international sports federations to handle it themselves. But as for the problem, Tim, of all of these creative ways that athletes have been cheating, lying about eye exams, fake wheelchairs, rolling around in snow, drugging themselves

before tests, all of the stuff that David and Jane have explained. How does that get solved here by this lawsuit? What happens with those issues in specific? So I think the lawsuit is just the beginning. But I asked David and Jane, I said, what do you want to happen here? And they were both an agreement that there needs to be an overhaul of the classification system in general. And what they ultimately want to see is to have the classification system be handled by an independent organization, an organization that's not affiliated with the country, with a sport. or the IPC, an organization that can oversee all this stuff without any bias, similar to maybe WADA. Right, the World Anti-Doping Agency. They want to treat classification doping like its actual doping. They also need to put more money into the classification system, the hiring of classifiers,

possibly equipment to test athletes instead of just doing hands-on testing, actual diagnostic equipment, to make sure that athletes do indeed have an impairment that they are claiming. And they've got to step up and just have more accountability to the rules and regulations that they've set forth. You can't have an athlete tell you what bike they're going to ride or what disability they have. And then you're just trying to verify that instead of actually check it and possibly dispute it. And I know Jane, as a classifier is out of the game now, He's no longer working the Paralympics. But David, the part that's so remarkable about this whole lawsuit is that he is an active athlete.

He's an athlete taking on the whole thing. And so where does his Paralympic dream stand as we're speaking right now here today? David's never participated in the Paralympics. He's never made the Paralympic team. And this year, leading up to the 2024 games, he was trying to qualify again. He attended a World Cup event in Italy. I was right on the verge of making a qualification time or not. And during a race there, he actually was going around a turn, overcooked it a little bit.

Ended up in a field with what I will consider mud. Maybe going a little too fast, maybe trying to compensate for competing against people who perhaps don't belong in his class. It didn't smell or look like mud. But I ended up sitting there for about 30 seconds sunk into the mud. about an inch and a half and the organizers pulled me out. I got back on my ride. His Paralympic dream, his chances probably died right there. You can go to a games and say, yes, I'm a Paralympian,

but what do you really gain from that when you have absolutely no possibility of actually meddling or being competitive at the games? So it's going halfway across the world to compete in the biggest sporting event to essentially be canon fodder for the individuals that are just going to crush you

based on their qualification and abilities. But even if David did qualify for the Paralympics, he told me he doesn't think he would have gone. And the reason for that is it doesn't mean what it used to. Yeah, this issue of pride that David was just talking about. it makes me think about what it takes for a guy to survive a plane crash and then devote himself to this sport

and then become a whistleblower in that same sport and then take on this giant institution that is so much more corrupt, Tim, obviously, than I ever realized. And I'm just left wondering here, how does he describe his relationship with the sport itself? Is he still hand cycling? Can he still enjoy the thing that he initially fell in love with? David is still hand cycling, he's still training. I don't know if he'll ever make the Paralympics. You know, he said it himself, he's getting older. And I think he's realized that this is his mission now. You know, his mission is to spread the word about what's really happening at the Paralympics,

that this cheating is going on, and it's his mission now to shine a light on it. There's something bittersweet about it that, you know, David never made the Paralympics, but he could have this massive win in German court over the IPC. Tim Rohan, thank you for reporting the story of what at the end here might actually result in a deserved victory. Thank you, Pablo. This has been Pablo Torre finds out. A Metal Arc Media production,

and I'll talk to you next time.