While the 2024 Paris Olympics are just barely underway (the Opening Ceremonies were Friday, but competition started Wednesday), there’s already a significant scandal around them. That’s around drone usage from the Canadian women’s soccer team, the defending Olympic champions.
That scandal has already led to head coach Bev Priestman being sent home. It also saw analyst Joseph Lombardi and assistant coach Jasmine Mander removed from the team, with Lombardi receiving an additional eight months suspended sentence from French authorities for violating their airspace regulations.
And that’s led to a lot of questions on how prevalent this has been in the past with both the Canadian women’s and men’s soccer teams. That includes what they did under the leadership of John Herdman, who is currently the head coach of MLS side Toronto FC, but led the Canadian women’s team from 2011-18, then the men’s team from 2018-2023.
And on that front, famed TSN investigative reporter Rick Westhead broke some notable new news there Friday. And that news contradicted some of what Herdman had said in his own comments to media Friday. Westhead particularly discussed a Canadian men’s national team pre-match briefing ahead of a 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifier in 2021; here’s more from his piece:
Seventeen players on Canada’s men’s national soccer team attended a briefing on Aug. 31, 2021, in a Toronto hotel ballroom and watched as head coach John Herdman played a video that showed the Honduran national team’s closed practice a day earlier, a source with first-hand knowledge of the meeting told TSN.
…The source’s account comes after Herdman’s public statements earlier today. Herdman, who coached the women’s national team from 2011 to 2018 and the men’s from 2018 to 2023 and who now coaches at Toronto FC, told reporters this morning that he was confident his teams never spied on competitors, at least at the sport’s largest events.
“I’m highly confident in my time as a head coach at an Olympic Games or World Cup we’ve never been involved in any of those activities,” Herdman said this morning. He declined to comment otherwise, citing Canada Soccer’s impending independent review of what happened in Paris.
The #MapleSpygate here (credit to Peyton Manning on NBC’s Olympic Opening Ceremonies for the Spygate part) certainly is growing. And the discussion of this specifically involving Herdman and men’s team players adds a lot to that.
Overall, there are investigations from FIFA, the IOC, and Canada Soccer themselves all in the works around this. And there are major implications here for both the past, including Canada’s 2021 Olympic women’s gold medal and more, and for the future of these teams and notable personalities around them, including Herdman and Priestman. We’ll see where it goes from here.
[TSN]
