Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Battle of the Bulge: We Expose a Crotch Conspiracy Rocking the Olympics About this episode 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" https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6961222/2026/01/20/olympics-norway-ski-jumping-scandal-suspensions
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Transcript 7,547 words · 17 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
0:07 Speaker 01 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.
0:16 Speaker 00 Right after this ad.
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2:33 Pablo Torre? 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, in 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.
2:49 Speaker 05 Right? Nailed it. Forget about this like, small matter of the NFL playoffs that might be going on right now. Who cares about that?
2:58 Pablo Torre? 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?
3:05 Speaker 05 Right.
3:06 Pablo Torre? And I did think to myself, oh, there's, there's, we got a news peg here.
3:09 Speaker 05 Sneaks up on me a little bit, too.
3:11 Pablo Torre? I mean, how many is this now?
3:12 Speaker 05 This is my 10th that I'll be on the ground for.
3:16 Pablo Torre? God.
3:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
3:17 Pablo Torre? 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 [bleep] nothing about. And that's useful. So thank you for being in studio with me.
3:40 Speaker 05 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?
3:49 Pablo Torre? 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.
4:23 Speaker 05 I mean, Olympic sports are completely ridden with scandal from start to finish, 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.
4:44 Pablo Torre? 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 curtain video that I can't wait for people to understand.
5:28 Pablo Torre? We got confidential documents that I'm waving around recklessly already in my, in my hand. It builds to something that can only be fairly described as crotch gate.
5:38 Speaker 06 There are many ways to cheat in sports. You can cork a baseball bat to make it lighter, 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.
5:51 Speaker 07 Specifically in the crotch area. And they caught Team Norway red-handed.
5:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, below the belt. We'd like to say this is a, a family, family program, but there may be segments where, you know.
6:04 Pablo Torre? It's a good trigger warning, man.
6:05 Speaker 05 You gotta, you gotta put the earmuffs on the, on the small children potentially.
6:09 Pablo Torre? We're going downhill in a very different sense.
6:11 Speaker 05 Definitely.
6:29 Pablo Torre? 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 this 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?
6:53 Speaker 05 To some extent, you're seeing an optical illusion, especially when you watch it on television.
7:04 Speaker 05 It looks like an athlete goes off a jump
7:09 Speaker 05 and is flying hundreds of feet above the ground.
7:18 Speaker 05 And landing on skis.
7:25 Speaker 05 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 gonna hurt. They may break a lot of bones and terrible things can happen.
7:56 Pablo Torre? Yes, we have ski jumping, in fact, to thank for this ridiculous crash on the classic intro for ABC's Wide World of Sports.
8:17 Pablo Torre? Which actually explains the famous line, the thrill of victory,
8:23 Pablo Torre? and the agony of defeat.
8:27 Pablo Torre? If I may give a suggestion to ski jumping, you gotta come up with a more dramatic name for what is happening here. You watch this [BLEEP] 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.
8:54 Speaker 05 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.
9:03 Pablo Torre? Right.
9:04 Speaker 05 It's not like skydiving where the parachute comes out.
9:07 Pablo Torre? Ski flying? Can we come up with like ski soaring, ski?
9:12 Speaker 05 Well, I think there is. I think there is a ski flying.
9:14 Pablo Torre? Is there?
9:15 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think there is something.
9:16 Pablo Torre? I have a lot to learn about this.
9:18 Speaker 05 They go off really, really big jumps and that's really long distance.
9:22 Pablo Torre? Body sailing?
9:23 Speaker 05 Heard that terminology. But yes, this is more than just your average, you know, quote unquote, ski jump.
9:31 Speaker 08 Showtime on the ski jumping hill in the mountains of Shangxiaqiu. Who will bring it in Beijing? Lindvik.
9:41 Pablo Torre? This is Beijing 2022. This is the gold medalist, Matt. Please introduce us to this gentleman as he takes off.
9:50 Speaker 05 This is Marius Lindvik. He's Norwegian. He's basically the best ski jumper in the world.
9:57 Speaker 08 Oh, he's absolutely nailed it, Lindvik.
10:02 Pablo Torre? So a couple of observations as I watch 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 this is bottom half.
10:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's a jumping suit. When you see ski jumpers walking around, in some sense, it's like something approaching. I'm gonna date myself a little bit here, but like David Byrne's suit.
10:36 Pablo Torre? Oh, yeah.
10:43 Speaker 05 It stopped making sense? It's something like that?
10:46 Pablo Torre? The physics of it, right? It's very simplistic. There's a sail kind of dynamic.
10:51 Speaker 05 You put a fairly big cloth on these bodies and the wind catches it. You don't want any drag. You want like your body to be in great position and you want to have a smooth material and you want lift. You want the air to really catch as much of that sail, so to speak, as possible.
11:16 Pablo Torre? This is, though, not to be, not to be a drag. This has not seemed to be a super popular sport across the world.
11:23 Speaker 05 No.
11:24 Pablo Torre? And so the cradle of this sport is where?
11:28 Speaker 05 Is sort of northern and central Europe. There may be a couple others there, but, you know, it's, 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.
11:51 Speaker 09 And in fact, he didn't know until Thursday afternoon he would be making this run in front of 40,000 fellow Norwegians.
12:00 Pablo Torre? Ninety-four, Lillehammer, in Norway. It's like, you know, Brazil hosting the World Cup.
12:06 Speaker 05 Absolutely.
12:07 Pablo Torre? Yeah, when you watch the opening ceremony, you actually see a dude carrying the Olympic torch
12:15 Pablo Torre? on a ski jump.
12:18 Speaker 09 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.
12:30 Speaker 05 So many of the sports in the Olympic Games are what we refer to as Nordic sports.
12:35 Speaker 09 He said he wasn't nervous. It was just another day at the office. But I don't believe it.
12:40 Speaker 05 Nordic is in the country name Norway.
12:47 Pablo Torre? A person who only knows about Norway through stereotypes is kind of imagining this.
12:52 Speaker 05 It's basically Mardi Gras.
12:54 Pablo Torre? Yes.
12:54 Speaker 05 I mean, it's basically Mardi Gras.
12:55 Pablo Torre? This is Norse Mardi Gras.
12:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, you know, this is a party.
13:00 Speaker 09 There are two jumpers to go. They're both of Norway, and the crowd can smell blood.
13:06 Speaker 05 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 are 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 5 million people being the all-time leader in Olympic medals in the Winter Games.
13:33 Speaker 09 Unbelievable, out of nowhere.
13:36 Speaker 05 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.
13:55 Speaker 05 You've got one of the national legends, Espen Breddesen.
14:00 Speaker 09 He is like, holy smoke, that's God, Espen Breddesen!
14:04 Speaker 05 Who wins the competition, and then you have Lasse Adessen, who's another huge figure.
14:10 Speaker 09 And there is the new young star as well to go alongside the old hand, Breddesen. Ortesen and Breddesen walk together very proudly in front of their nation now.
14:21 Pablo Torre? Silver medalist.
14:22 Speaker 05 In the sports, silver medalist in ski jumping in 1994 in Lillehammer, 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.
14:36 Pablo Torre? Oh yeah, Lasse Adessen, who I hope is better at ski jumping than he is high-fiving. That was, you know, not the most.
14:42 Speaker 05 Well, this was early generation high-five, I think. You go back to 94.
14:47 Pablo Torre? Yeah, riding on a curve, it took a bit to get to Norway, in fairness to Lasse Adessen, Norwegian ski jumping legend.
14:54 Speaker 05 Right.
14:55 Speaker 09 Today, though, was Norway's day, and in particular, that of the young man, Ortesen, and the veteran campaigner, Breddesen. They really ruled today.
15:10 Pablo Torre? But speaking of Norwegian enthusiasm, you were not there, Matt. You were not there on the mountain in 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 Schefter of ski jumping, although that would be a funny person to exist. This guy, I'm gonna let you introduce him. Who is this man?
15:34 Speaker 05 Well, let's call him Eric.
15:36 Speaker 10 My name is Eric Rune Sande, it sounds like a Norwegian name and it is. I am 70 years old, I'm retired.
15:45 Speaker 05 And we'll let him introduce himself.
15:48 Speaker 10 I was on the Olympics in Lillehammer. I lived in Oslo then, and I remember 03:30 in the morning, I got up. We took the bus down to the train station. It's two hour 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 2:30 late night. It was fantastic.
16:19 Pablo Torre? Yeah, listening to this guy talk, there is a religiosity, I dare say, to his description.
16:26 Speaker 10 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 in world championship and in Olympics and everything. So this is a good.
16:51 Pablo Torre? 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.
17:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, they have, but they're not as dominant as they used to be.
17:11 Pablo Torre? It makes me want to just compare and contrast whatever the American competitive ideology is around sports or the Norwegian attitude. How would you summarize that?
17:21 Speaker 05 So I sort of think of the American idea of competition as win at just about every cost.
17:32 Speaker 05 You would talk about somebody in America as, you know, being really driven and being really ambitious and being really competitive. And those would be compliments. In Norway, those are kind of like insults.
17:48 Pablo Torre? You mean naked desperation to win is not a virtue?
17:52 Speaker 05 No, you're supposed to win, you're supposed to wanna win, but it's not supposed to look like you wanna 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 wanna do too much peacocking. End zone dances would not be a big thing. It's just a 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 like all the kids are involved with them. But it's really important to the Norwegians that they stay pretty unserious and pretty uncompetitive
18:37 Speaker 05 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.
18:52 Pablo Torre? 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.
19:13 Speaker 05 It is now.
19:14 Pablo Torre? Yeah, from like the natural gas supply export.
19:16 Speaker 05 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.
19:30 Pablo Torre? Yes, healthcare and country houses, built to top oil reserves.
19:34 Speaker 05 Right. So there is both, you know, happiness and celebration and enjoyment of all this stuff.
19:42 Pablo Torre? And enthusiastic high fiving.
19:44 Speaker 05 Yes, enthusiastic high fiving, but also a good bit of guilt.
19:48 Pablo Torre? 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.
20:02 Speaker 05 Yes, you are using every little edge. And like we've seen in the last, say, 20 years in baseball, for instance, like, 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.
20:30 Speaker 10 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? It's all these things.
21:02 Speaker 05 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, you know, just a bunch of guys drinking beer and going flying off a ski jump and seeing how far they can go.
21:32 Pablo Torre? 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?
21:47 Speaker 05 Yeah. Well, maybe not make the anatomy bigger, but make the stuff around the anatomy bigger.
21:54 Pablo Torre? Yeah, it's a very important distinction. We're talking about a penis parachute, not the actual penis.
21:59 Speaker 10 It was so shameless, obviously, that they have really passed the border for what's normal and not normal.
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24:06 Pablo Torre? 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.
24:17 Speaker 05 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 as a larger inseam.
24:36 Pablo Torre? That's the New York Times Company's approved description.
24:40 Speaker 05 Right, and... That'll give you more lift.
24:43 Pablo Torre? And in fact, in case you think this is a purely abstract premise, we do helpfully have a video of Inspector Crotch.
24:52 Speaker 01 Has it always gone this way? Okay, I'm not defined the big.
24:56 Pablo Torre? What is Inspector Crotch's real name, Matt?
25:00 Speaker 05 That is Lasie Utsen, who we recently saw giving one of the greatest high fives in the history of sport.
25:10 Speaker 05 He, in his post-jumping life, has become, you know, one of the most respected Nordic sports officials. He is the director of Nordic Combined for FIS, the International Skiing Federation, which is the Federation Internationale du Ski. And he generously volunteered to demonstrate how FIS gets a 3D model of all of its athletes' dimensions.
25:43 Pablo Torre? And for those of you who are not watching on YouTube, you've made a horrible mistake because this is in fact the region's ski jumping legend, Lasie Utsen, 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, uh, sort of like, supports on what appear to be a vertical rotisserie, which is rotating endlessly 360 degrees.
26:10 Speaker 05 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.
26:24 Pablo Torre? And I love that we asked for this video and they gave it to us. It is a very invasive fact-checking process.
26:32 Speaker 05 If you're gonna be a ski jumper, you're gonna bear it all and you're gonna get measured.
26:36 Pablo Torre? It's a literal [BLEEP] measuring contest.
26:39 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's out there now, I guess. You've put it out there.
26:42 Pablo Torre? You know, you are a Pulitzer Prize winner and I assign you-
26:45 Speaker 05 Well, as part of a team, just to make sure. I don't wanna big myself up too much.
26:50 Pablo Torre? Well, on this team, on the Pablo Torre Finds Out team, you're supposed to ask a very hard question.
26:56 Speaker 05 Is it embarrassing the way they get measured for the suits? Is it awkward?
27:01 Speaker 01 I assume that you're referring to the crotch area of the suit, which is the area that are the most, or let's say, has the most influence in terms of the suit.
27:13 Speaker 05 Well, 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 four centimeters larger than your body's surface area.
27:30 Speaker 01 So we're measuring the whole body. How big is it? 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 crotch measurement of all the athletes, which we're doing before the jump and after the jump.
28:04 Speaker 05 You mentioned the word circumference. Are you talking about the circumference of the legs? What exactly are we?
28:10 Speaker 01 It's the circumference of the legs, yes. So right leg, left leg. The middle one, we're not measuring for the male athletes.
28:19 Speaker 05 Okay, got it, got it. Thank you for that clarification.
28:24 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I'm not going to even comment on, you know, I thought it was girth, but we'll go with what he decided.
28:28 Speaker 05 You gotta ask the really hard questions in this business.
28:32 Pablo Torre? As an investigative reporter, we will settle for nothing less.
28:35 Speaker 12 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.
28:48 Pablo Torre? 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.
29:05 Speaker 12 Lindvik has matched Wellinger's distance.
29:09 Pablo Torre? Dominates the Normal Hill.
29:12 Speaker 12 Lindvik surely has done it, and he has.
29:16 Pablo Torre? But then, as the weekend arrives, March 7th, it's the main event.
29:23 Speaker 12 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Norway, to Trondheim, and to the big hill.
29:30 Pablo Torre? And here, Marius Lindvik, defending Olympic gold medalist.
29:34 Speaker 12 The winner of the qualification. Two gold medals and a bronze medal in his kit bag already.
29:40 Pablo Torre? Is in second place at the moment through the first round of jumps with another shot at gold.
29:47 Speaker 01 It's been a fantastic championships and I think everyone was extremely happy about how, you know, we've had full house of spectators. We've had very, very exciting events in all.
29:57 Pablo Torre? But in the middle of all of this, Matt, with Inspector Crotch himself in attendance, everyone's attention turns somewhere else.
30:09 Speaker 01 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 sent out, it was public. Someone had videotaped something and, and, you know, not saying that that.
30:29 Pablo Torre? There is 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.
31:10 Speaker 05 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.
31:25 Pablo Torre? 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 10:00 PM and after midnight, the night before the race.
31:53 Speaker 05 Isn't it great that it happened sometime between 10:00 PM and midnight?
31:58 Pablo Torre? It is.
31:58 Speaker 05 I mean, it's like the Watergate break.
32:00 Pablo Torre? That's right.
32:00 Speaker 05 It's just like, it's just great. It would be so much less interesting if it was 3:30 in the afternoon while they're getting a coffee or something like that.
32:08 Pablo Torre? There is the most obvious deep throat joke here that I also will just leave to the side.
32:12 Speaker 05 Do you know about the Zapruder tape from the Kennedy assassination? It was this, is this video like the Zapruder video of ski jumping?
32:24 Speaker 01 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 jumping 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 than than than anything else, yeah?
32:48 Speaker 05 I don't want to compare it necessarily to doping because doping is a different thing that like brings the health of an athlete into it. And the main reason like 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, you know, had a hidden camera in Lance Armstrong's team's blood bank, essentially. And they were getting blood transfusions before and during the Tour de France.
33:29 Speaker 05 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.
33:45 Pablo Torre? And much like the doping scandals you reference, it involves the highly problematic use of needles.
33:52 Speaker 05 There you go.
33:53 Pablo Torre? It's just hard not to compare this to Deflategate. The last time there was a massive equipment-related scandal. Of course, the opposite sort of a scandal in which their ball became smaller.
34:03 Speaker 05 Yeah, right? Isn't that the irony?
34:05 Pablo Torre? Tom Brady.
34:05 Speaker 05 Isn't that the irony of ironies? But yes, the New England Patriots deflating the balls a little bit so that Tom Brady 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...
34:23 Pablo Torre? I forgot about that hammer.
34:24 Speaker 05 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.
34:33 Pablo Torre? You know what? On the list of things I loved on 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.
34:47 Speaker 05 Yeah. You think there were some pictures on that phone that he didn't want to go public?
34:51 Pablo Torre? I would, I would love to find out. In this case, this blew up the world championships.
34:57 Speaker 05 It absolutely blew up the world championships because the world championships are in Norway. Norway's doing really well, but it breaks in the middle of everything.
35:08 Pablo Torre? 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 from 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.
35:36 Pablo Torre? In fact, he decided to jump anyway.
35:44 Pablo Torre? Perhaps because, to quote another guy wearing a suit that was way too big, "I don't care how impossible it seems."
35:59 Speaker 01 And in this case, we, after, you know, 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, it felt like, or how it looked. A very chaotic day, that's for sure. Never seen anything like it before. And of course, needed to, to, to bring that on to our system and into our ethics department and, and make sure that, you know, it was handled in a professional and good way when we, when we saw something like this going on.
36:36 Pablo Torre? And in this case, given the geopolitical context, kind of like the Norwegian nightmare.
36:43 Speaker 05 Total nightmare also. And that's the other wrinkle in it is because this like absolutely horrifies Norwegians. It sort of cuts to the core of who they are. You know, 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.
37:18 Pablo Torre? Oh.
37:18 Speaker 05 Is just a real sort of national shame.
37:32 Speaker 13 I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.
38:02 Speaker 11 Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a health. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
38:40 Speaker 14 What's going on in Norway? The cheeto of Scandinavia. Ski jumping Norwegians admitted to cheating by using manipulated jumpsuits with a reinforced thread.
38:53 Speaker 14 And?
38:53 Speaker 15 The International Ski and Snowboard Federation have opened an investigation.
38:57 Speaker 06 We still have many unanswered questions we must get to the bottom of. This incident will have consequences. Sees the suit, says 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.
39:12 Pablo Torre? 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?
39:29 Speaker 05 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 [BLEEP]. 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, 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 shrugged their shoulders and were like, yeah, okay, you guys cheat too. That's not how it goes in Norway.
40:13 Speaker 05 Like, this is sort of a national reckoning. How could this possibly have happened? How could we possibly do this? And the guy at the center of it, the coach, Magnus Brav, like... Pretty much immediately falls on his sword.
40:30 Pablo Torre? Quote, "It was a deliberate act, and consequently, it's cheating. I definitely should have stopped it as head coach."
40:39 Pablo Torre? End quote. 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.
41:16 Speaker 05 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.
41:31 Pablo Torre? And that's a code name. Crotchgate is not the code name, in fact. Code name, Project Pine.
41:37 Speaker 05 Yeah, I don't want to comment on the wood involved.
41:40 Pablo Torre? Neither of us will because we're too classy and too journalistically rigorous. Looking through this, and I just need your help in establishing, what did these investigators find out?
41:53 Speaker 05 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 rife with 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.
42:39 Speaker 05 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.
42:58 Pablo Torre? But in any good investigation into a cheating scandal, there is the question of who knew what and when.
43:04 Speaker 05 Right.
43:04 Speaker 16 What did the president know?
43:08 Speaker 16 And when did he know it?
43:09 Pablo Torre? 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?
43:18 Speaker 05 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.
43:44 Pablo Torre? So what does that mean, that they got light penalties?
43:46 Speaker 05 So the athletes received some very light penalty suspensions of a couple of months that they were able to serve during the summer. Basically.
43:55 Speaker 05 You know?
43:57 Speaker 05 This is sort of like Iggy Shviantek, the former world number one tennis player, getting suspended for allegedly doping not intentionally and getting a suspension that she served during December.
44:11 Pablo Torre? It's kind of like a starting pitcher getting suspended games that he's not pitching.
44:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, if you got a four day suspension as a starting pitcher, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, they got very light suspensions.
44:20 Pablo Torre? 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 did, and 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?
44:52 Speaker 05 The tower is, you know, about 25 stories.
44:56 Pablo Torre? 25 stories.
44:57 Speaker 05 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.
45:04 Pablo Torre? Right.
45:04 Speaker 05 So it's real, you're really high. You're really high, you're going really fast.
45:08 Pablo Torre? I think I'd want to know.
45:09 Speaker 05 By the way, like, these Norwegian ski jumpers, they're gonna be in the Olympics. The coaches and the equipment manager have been made the fall guys for this.
45:20 Pablo Torre? Well, so now we get to the brass tacks 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.
46:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, Tom Brady was back for the playoffs, wasn't he?
46:05 Speaker 05 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 FIS 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 the sport.
46:46 Pablo Torre? 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. You've talked a lot here about how this is a very Norwegian story and there's a very exotic northern European aspect to it.
47:31 Pablo Torre? That [__] sounds pretty American. Like, the biggest problem actually is that all you people talked about it, now we gotta do something about it. The biggest problem, in fact, is PR.
47:40 Speaker 05 Right. You made us look bad.
47:43 Pablo Torre? How dare you?
47:44 Speaker 05 How dare you make us look bad for the lax way in which we were doing our jobs.
47:50 Pablo Torre? How dare you make us look smaller than we want to be?
47:55 Speaker 05 Exactly. It's in some ways a unique scandal. In other ways, it's just like all the rest of it.
48:02 Pablo Torre? Yeah. Matt Futterman, thank you for investigating a story that is more familiar than I think any of us, frankly, would like to admit.
48:13 Speaker 05 Pretty familiar. Yeah.
48:24 Pablo Torre? For a lot more on this story, we do encourage you to read our colleague Matt Futterman's exhaustively reported piece in The Athletic, which is out right now. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.
49:07 Speaker 13 My old phone. Can I also get the latest iPhone every year? Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.
49:32 Speaker 11 Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals. No kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
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