Canadian women's soccer team loses six points, coach banned over drone scandal | Hacker News Reader

Canadian women's soccer team loses six points, coach banned over drone scandal

reuters.com

21 pointstagyro48 comments

As a Canadian, this is utterly embarrassing. I can't believe it was happening for years, even at the under-16 level, and was common knowledge.

I think they should withdraw from the Olympics voluntarily. I get that it sucks for the athletes, but at this point, the best thing they could do is set an example for younger kids. I've seen high school teams get booted from tournaments for less.

As embarrassing and disappointing as it must be for Canadians, the fact their team put drone operation skills in a job advertisement is honestly hilarious.

It’s honestly not.

Drones are a very common part of soccer - they are a way for staff to see what is happening from above. They’re only an issue when you use them to spy on your opponents.

I wonder if they're allowed to withdraw without consequence. I can't imagine the IOC would be thrilled about two matches being canceled, particularly one against France which will probably see over ten thousand fans.

And though your point of setting an example is completely fair, I can easily imagine the IOC saying they refused to play as they couldn't win anyway.

Not a football surgeon myself, but with 6 point deduction they are toast anyway aren't they?

Was it considered cheating that the English goalie had statistics about penalty kick preferences of opposing players written on his water bottle (and concealed under a towel) in the semi-finals for the Euros?

no - the key difference is those penalty kick stats are derived from watching the games, which are public, not from surreptitious surveillance of private practice sessions

but then why hide it under the bottle?

It’s not hidden. It’s just on the bottle because it’s convenient for a keeper to reference.

The bottle was wrapped in a towel.

I have no idea what the Euros rules are, but this could have been him wanting to keep all his stuff together without the paper blowing away.

I can't say for them, but towel is good heat insulator and can keep bottle content cold. I use it often for that reason (either towel or other clothes that's already in backpack).

It’s just strategy.

If I have a penalty kick and you’re the keeper, I want to know if you know where I kick the ball most often. If I know that you know, I will kick somewhere else.

So if you’re the keeper and you know my habits, you have a slight advantage if I don’t know that you know. So you would hide the list.

Easy hey?

Did the Canadian players know the staff were doing this?

> "We feel terrible for the athletes on the Canadian Women's Olympic soccer team who as far as we understand played no role in this matter," said David Shoemaker, CEO and Secretary General of the Canadian Olympic Committee.

Canada were deducted six points seems odd in US English. Are there other flavo(u)rs where that wouldn't seem weird?

You mean like possibly that other place which is well known for various reasons where they speak English known as England?

Canada is a plural noun here, as it refers to the collective teammates, not the nation-state.

Sorry - not the plural sense, the use of "deducted" .

I agree. The points were deducted from the team's total. The team itself was not deducted (though I guess you could argue without the points, the team was deducted from the tournament, lol)

Deduct is correct verb here. Penalize might work, but deduct is fine. As there was removal of points from total as an "addition". Not removal as removing some score like points gained from winning a game.

>New Zealand had complained that Canadian staff flew drones over their training sessions before their opening fixture at the Olympics

What's the problem with this? I don't get it. Did the rules say no drones over training sessions or something?

Using surveillance equipment to gather information on your opponents is certainly at least violating the spirit of the games. As a Canadian I'm glad this team is seeing consequences.

I understand now. It wasn't immediately clear to me from the pronouns that the Canadian team was running drones over someone ELSE's training session.

Spying on the competition is unsporting, this isn't something new. Just new tech being used to violate old social norms.

TBH I don't get that either. I mean, wouldn't you want to know how the opponent is going to play? And what if they just send someone to watch?

But hey, I'm probably going to be downvoted for spirit of the games. But to be, wanting to win (as long as not offending the law) is the most important part of the spirit.

Spying on other teams regardless of the technology has long been regarded as unsportsmanlike conduct, across all sports. This is nothing new and if anything your attitude to win using spying is against the norms.

I mean, they do watch replays and do data analysis too, right? Sure there is a difference, but to me, it's not a whole lot of difference.

Edit: I'm sure they don't refrain from watching the opponents playing against other teams too...

It's a difference seeing what lineup they prepare for the match against you and specifically prepare for that, preparing for set pieces they're practicing to use against you, seeing where they're practicing to place their next penalty kick etc. - vs just general prep based on public information.

The difference is that this was during practice sessions.

The "unsportsmanlike" aspects isn't about the difference in intelligence gathered, but avoiding the need for every team to run counter-surveillance operations.

That’s the trouble—it’s zero-sum waste that becomes mandatory if it’s permitted.

Right.

Sports is definitively not war, and not all is fair. Otherwise why ban doping, or disapprove of Tanya Harding getting her competitor kneecapped, etc.

I didn’t downvote you for “spirit of the games” but I did downvote you because you don’t seem to know much about sports. Practices are not always full speed, they don’t necessarily include players playing as opposition and are often times to make small adjustments for the next opponent.

In this case, Canada was spying on New Zealand while they were doing set plays. It’s quite common to make adjustments to set plays to counter something an opponent is particularly good at.

If I watch a game, I can see how that team prepares for another team. If I watch them practice, I can see how they prepare for my team. That gives me time to adjust before the game as opposed to trying to make adjustments from the sidelines. And it gives me and my team a tremendous advantage.

So yes, if you are the kind of person who wants to win at all costs, spying on practices would be smart. I ride or die with your teammates but not with people who do that. Winning is nice, but sports are about being the best not the least ethical.

Among other things, the entire olympic area is a no-fly-zone (for obvious reasons) and they have thus commited a crime under french law. In other articles it mentions that the pilot faces 8 months in prison. Noone wants to set precedence of allowing/enabling national rule braking.

And this is a symptom of why I am no longer interested in the Olympics. I mainly lost interest when they started allowing professional athletes to compete. Plus now, based upon various news items, the IOC is riff with graft and bribery.

In the old days, the Olympics was a venue were aspiring athletes got to get a second chance of turning pro, or at the very least a way for them to get recognition for their hard work. Now in many cases, it is now a bunch of multi-millionaires feeding their somewhat narcissistic drives.

I won't even go into my belief kids under 18 should not compete in the Olympics.

"In the old days, the Olympics was a venue were aspiring athletes got to get a second chance of turning pro, or at the very least a way for them to get recognition for their hard work. Now in many cases, it is now a bunch of multi-millionaires feeding their somewhat narcissistic drives."

This entire sentence is ridiculous and inaccurate.

What is inaccurate about it

1.) The Olympics have never been a place for a second chance. There are miracles of course and occasionally some low ranked athletes perform well. But for the most part, it’s the best of the best.

2.) Relatively few Olympic sports even have professional leagues that we would think of as professional leagues.

3.) A small number of stars make money. The vast majority make absolutely no money. Instead of trusting a snarky person on the internet, here is a quote from the CEO of the USATF:

“Most of our [athletes] make less than $50,000 a year, and for many, much less than that”

Or consider that in 2016, ~ 140 athletes had to resort to GoFundMe to pay their costs to attend the Olympics.

4.) They talk about letting professionals in like it was a simple thing. Professionals in the Olympics have been a problem since 1912 when Jim Thorpe had his medals in decathlon and pentathlon stripped because he had played professional baseball.

5.) The way they talk about IOC corruption implies they must have stopped watching the Olympics in 1920. Budapest won the games that year but the France dominated IOC stripped them of it (they had been enemies in World War One) and gave it to Brussels.

That’s a start. I can continue if needed.

i lost interest when athletes were forbidden to publicly write about their events because that violated some sort of "exclusive media rights" package that had been sold by the olympics. to be fair i was never particularly interested in the first place because i find sports pretty dull, but i used to at least keep up with news about the olympics before that. afterwards i simply stopped paying attention altogether.

Errr..

> https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a37039437/1904-...

And the IOC has been infamously corrupt since I was a kids in the 80s watching the US/SR win/lose in the most ridiculous ways...

FWIW, I am much older than you :)

How is that appropriate? They didn’t say a thing about their age.

> multi-millionaires

In the 80s this really meant something. Nowadays, that's just table stakes for homeownership.

The average HN commenter is probably way richer than the average Olympian.

Some olympic sports are akin to hobbies, others hardly pay. And most are pretty harsh living compared to effort. Only a select few are actual good income makers. And even then quite likely depend on good marketability and good sponsors.

> Now in many cases, it is now a bunch of multi-millionaires feeding their somewhat narcissistic drives

I can guarantee you that even all of the athletes in my country don't sum up to multi-millionaire status together :D They all have day jobs.

I am sure that is true, but we are never shown that. In this country we only get to see sports our athletes are contenders in and only matches they are playing in :(

Plus this professionalism mostly lock out countries like yours and small countries from able to compete fairly. Most of the time the pros always win.

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