Culture

Remembering ESPN's Chris Mortensen, who changed how the NFL is covered

Published

2 months ago

May 14, 2024

Remembering ESPN's Chris Mortensen, who changed how the NFL is covered

The phone call Adam Schefter always feared came on his first Sunday at home in five months. It was early March, and ESPN’s senior NFL reporter had recently flown back from Indianapolis after a week at the scouting combine. He was about to sit down for breakfast with his family when his cell buzzed.

It was his boss, Seth Markman.

“We lost him,” was all Markman could muster.

For years, Schefter had known the call might come — when your close friend and colleague is diagnosed with Stage 4 throat cancer at age 64, you prepare for the worst. There were a few times in 2020, and a few more in 2022, when Schefter thought to himself, This might be it. But Chris Mortensen always pulled though.

“A tough son of a bitch,” Markman said.

“He fought for every single day he got,” adds Daniel Jeremiah of NFL Network.

When Mort first revealed his diagnosis to Schefter, over email in 2016, he begged his pal to keep it quiet for a few days — Mort’s son, Alex, was about to coach in college football’s national championship game, and he didn’t want to spoil his moment. Mort was always more worried about what this would do to his wife, Micki, than the grueling treatment ahead. “Micki is really struggling,” he closed the email. “I’m still going to be a jackass.”

He never let on how draining it was: the chemo, the radiation that left burns all over his neck, the IV regimen that sapped his strength but not his spirit. He dropped weight. He lost hair. His voice faded. When friends would ask how he was doing, he’d shrug them off. “I’m fine, I’m good,” Mort would tell them. “I’m dealing with it.”

He worked about as long as he could. At the 2023 draft, Mort’s last at ESPN, he had to use a spray bottle to wet his mouth between segments. His saliva glands had stopped working.

He retired. He spent last fall watching Alex call plays as UAB’s offensive coordinator. His friends thought he was doing fine, all things considered. Schefter called him from the combine this year after finding out one of Schefter’s five dogs, Benny, had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Mort consoled him, never mentioning how he was feeling. It was the last time the two spoke.

“He sounded better, like things were going the right way,” Schefter says.

Adds ESPN colleague Mel Kiper, Jr., “Nobody was prepared for it to happen now.”

Mort spent the night before he died at home on his horse farm in Arkansas watching football drills and TV coverage of the combine, cracking jokes on text threads.

Jeremiah got the news during a commercial break the next day, then broke down when Rich Eisen asked him about it on the air. The man who’d jumpstarted his career — “None of it happens without him,” he says — was gone. With tears in his eyes, Jeremiah tried to settle himself.

“Mort would’ve punched me in the face if I didn’t finish that broadcast right,” he says.

A few hours later, Schefter’s phone buzzed again. It was John Walsh, a longtime ESPN executive. “I want you to know how much Mort pushed you for this job,” Walsh told him.

“I know, John, I know,” Schefter said.

“No, I don’t think you really do,” Walsh followed. “You wouldn’t be at ESPN if not for Mort.”

Two months later, Schefter is in his office, staring at a picture of him and Mort from a Super Bowl a few years back.

“I miss him making me laugh,” Schefter says. “I don’t laugh as much without him.

“I just …”

He pauses. He sighs.

“I just cannot believe he’s not here.”

Adam Schefter (left) was hired at ESPN in large part because of Chris Mortensen, and the two grew close over the years. (Courtesy of ESPN)

They didn’t come for the reporter. They came for the man.

Former head coaches. Current general managers. Hundreds of ESPN colleagues who overlapped with Mortensen during his 32-year run at the network — Adrian Wojnarowski even flew in during the NBA playoffs — descended on a small Arkansas town last week to remember one of the most influential reporters in NFL history.

But they didn’t tell stories about what he did. They told stories about who he was.

Mort was a prankster, the coworker who always made the room feel lighter. In all his years at ESPN, nobody gave Chris Berman more grief. Once, when the network’s new fantasy football expert, Matthew Berry, walked into the room to watch his first Sunday slate of games with the group, Mort piped up. “Why don’t you sit here, Matthew?” he said, guiding Berry to a spot in the front row. What Berry didn’t know: The seat belonged to Berman, every Sunday, no questions asked. And Berman hated fantasy football. “Still does,” Schefter says.

A minute later, Berman entered, looked around the room and saw the fantasy football guy parked in his seat.

“You’re in the wrong chair,” he bellowed.

Mort and the rest of the room burst into laughter.

(For years, Berry named his fantasy team “The Wrong Chair.”)

After Berman’s daughter, Meredith, was diagnosed with tongue cancer a few years back, Mort became her sounding board. A rapport developed, two patients slogging through treatment, venting for hours on the phone. One would make it. One wouldn’t. “He was a rock for her,” Berman says, “and probably on some days when he was suffering terribly.”

He was selfless. When Markman was recruiting Schefter to ESPN in 2009, his bosses were on board — as long as Mort was on board. At the time, Mort was ESPN’s chief NFL reporter, the face of the network’s coverage for two decades running.

One Sunday morning, Markman nervously made his way to the green room, worried that Mort might squash the idea entirely. “He had that kind of power,” Markman remembers.

“I’m gonna be honest,” he told Mort, “it’s gonna cut into your screen time quite a bit.”

Mort didn’t hesitate.

“Seth, if we can get Adam Schefter, you get him,” he said. “Less of me on TV is a good thing.”

Markman laughs, reliving the story 15 years later.

“Are you kidding me?” he says. “Less of me is a good thing? Nobody in this industry says that.”

Mort and Schefter grew incredibly tight. And as Mort’s health deteriorated following his diagnosis, and as Schefter climbed into the top chair, Mort coached him behind the scenes.

“That sort of thing never happens,” says Bryan Curtis, who writes about sports media for The Ringer. “People who get to that level are very, very competitive, and in almost every instance, it doesn’t work. This did. And it allowed ESPN to own NFL scoops for 10 years.”

Mort was the best kind of mentor. When Jeremiah was still in college, he walked into his parents’ living room one afternoon and wondered why the guy from ESPN was sitting on the couch. It was January 1998, a week before the Broncos played the Packers in the Super Bowl in San Diego, and Mort was in town to cover the game. He’d attended a church service hosted by Jeremiah’s father, David, and stopped by for lunch afterward.

Daniel was a 21-year-old quarterback at Appalachian State with dreams of getting into broadcasting.

“Well, I’ve got an interview with Reggie White tomorrow, would you wanna come with me?” Mort asked him.

“This was literally the first time I met him,” Jeremiah remembers. “I was like, ‘Reggie White! Are you kidding me?’”

After that interview wrapped, Mort urged him to tag along at media day later in the week. A year later, he was sitting next to Mort at the NFL Draft in New York City, answering his phones and jotting down notes from GMs. A year later, Mort introduced him to Jay Rothman, who produced “Sunday Night Football.” Jeremiah had his first full-time job.

“All because of Mort,” he says.

A few years later, after Jeremiah spent time scouting for the Ravens and Browns, it was Mort who pushed him to jump on this new social media platform called Twitter and dissect draft prospects. Mort would routinely urge his followers to check out @MoveTheSticks, and each time he did Jeremiah would pick up thousands of new followers.

Jeremiah just wrapped his sixth draft as NFL Network’s lead analyst, and his first without a tradition he’d come to cherish: a meeting with Mort the morning before the first round. They’d done it every year dating to 2000, when he was just a grunt answering phones and scribbling down notes.

“It was so weird not having him there,” Jeremiah says. “That man is literally the reason I’m in the seat I am in.”

Mortensen was a prankster, a coworker who always lightened the mood of a room. (Courtesy of ESPN)

Chris Mortensen wasn’t the first football scribe to make the jump to TV full-time — that distinction belongs to Will McDonough — but, after joining ESPN in 1991, he became the most prominent, a pioneer of what’s become ubiquitous today: the insider.

“If Will McDonough created the role of NFL insider,” Curtis says, “then Mort refined it, sped it up and brought it into the era of cable TV.”

Still, back then some saw it as a risky move. ESPN wasn’t yet a sports media juggernaut, and newspaper beat writers still carried considerable weight. So did Sports Illustrated.

“The other writers used to make fun of their brethren when they moved to TV,” says Chip Namias, a former PR director for the Dolphins, Oilers and Bucs. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you’re a pretty boy now? Being a newspaper guy isn’t good enough for you?’ When Mort made that jump, it was a gamble.”

It paid off — for him and ESPN. Mort brought with him the reporting chops he’d honed at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Sporting News and The National. Suddenly, he was everywhere: on “NFL Game Day,” which became “NFL Countdown,” which became “Sunday NFL Countdown.” As the league’s popularity boomed, Mort became one of the faces of the network.

More than that, he became the pulse of the NFL.

Peyton Manning used to carve out a few minutes on Sunday mornings before kickoff, hoping to catch “The Mort Report” in the locker room, Mortensen’s weekly segment in which he’d dish all the morsels of info he’d gathered during the week. “QBs watched, GMs watched, coaches watched,” Manning says. “You had to watch. Mort knew who was getting fired before the people who were actually getting fired knew.”

Back when he was a Broncos beat writer for The Rocky Mountain News and later The Denver Post, Schefter would make sure he was in his hotel room, or next to a TV at the stadium, whenever Mort was on the air.

Curtis says during his AJ-C days, Mort began every conversation with a source the same way: “Tell me something I don’t know.” But more than merely breaking news, he loved to uncover the why behind a firing or the release of a player or a trade. That took time. And trust.

“He never blindsided you with anything,” says a longtime NFL PR director, Dan Edwards, who worked for the Steelers and Jaguars. “Mort was like a boy scout.”

He was also ahead of his time. Mort was working even when he wasn’t. An example: in the early 2000s, he grew close with Archie Manning, patriarch of the most famous family in football. That led to trips down to Louisiana for the Manning Passing Academy each summer, where Mort befriended Peyton and Eli and also dozens of the top quarterback prospects in the country. “Mort was always five steps ahead of everyone else,” longtime NFL writer Peter King says. “By the time those kids got to the NFL, Mort had known them for 10 years.”

One year at camp, after a few coaches flew home early, Mort volunteered to run some drills. It was the last practice of the week, the one all the parents watch before picking up their sons. “My dad pulls up in the golf cart and sees Mort teaching these kids the three-step drop,” Peyton says, trying not to laugh. “Then he sees all the parents watching. Dad goes, ‘Well, this is it. This is officially the end of the Manning Passing Academy.’”

Peyton Manning (right), like many QBs, coaches and executives around the NFL, regularly watched “The Mort Report.” (Courtesy of the Manning Passing Academy).

Of all the star players Mort covered, he grew closest with Peyton Manning. In the winter of 2012, it was Mort who first warned the quarterback, coming off a fourth neck surgery: “Be ready, the Colts might be moving on.” They were words that might’ve seemed obvious to everyone else at the time but stung Manning nonetheless.

“Oh, wow,” the QB responded.

The two traded emails during Manning’s free agency tour a few months later. “He’d give me the lay of the land with each team, an unbiased opinion I needed,” Manning says. “I could confide in Mort. Mort could confide in me.”

Four years later, after Manning helped the Broncos win Super Bowl 50, Mort broke the news of the QB’s retirement from a hospital in Atlanta. Manning had told him the day before, asking for one last night as an NFL quarterback. Mort vowed to hold the story until morning. Markman was up all night, fearing they’d get scooped.

“We won’t get beat,” Mort kept telling him.

“He wouldn’t break his word,” Markman says now. “And of course, he was right.”

Today, Manning keeps a folder in his email of all the notes Mort sent him over the years.

One came after his first preseason game as a Bronco. Manning had sent a select few — family, friends, Mort, that’s it — a clip of him hitting a receiver on an out route, then taking a nasty hit in the pocket. It was the sequence that told him he could still play in the NFL.

“Super proud to see this,” Mort wrote back. “Enjoy this. You deserve it.”

On the job, Mort was a disciplined reporter — “the last of the old school guys,” Schefter calls him. He’d bicker with Markman, agitated over some of the segments they’d run on ESPN. Mort loathed hot takes. He’d grumble each time one of the NFL shows ran its “Safe or Out” segment, a debate about which NFL coaches were about to get fired. “These are human beings,” Mort argued. “We’re talking about people’s lives here.”

Kiper says whenever he’d get some shaky intel from a source, Mort would reach out. “We should talk,” he’d warn. “That was code for, ‘I’m hearing different,’” Kiper says.

Andrea Kremer remembers the way Mort welcomed her when she became ESPN’s first female reporter in the early 1990s. “It was always support, courtesy and respect,” she says. “This was a different time for women in the business, and when a coach or a GM sees Chris Mortensen treat you that way — as an equal — that gives you instant credibility.”

Mort’s influence was so immense, his Rolodex so envied, that at one point an NFL team actually hired him.

In 1994, the expansion Jacksonville Jaguars lured Mortensen away from ESPN for a role as vice president on the personnel side. They wanted him to help build their football team. Mort accepted the gig, only to emotionally back out a few days later, mainly because Micki didn’t want to move to Jacksonville.

“When you think about it on the surface, the job made no sense,” says Pete Prisco, a longtime NFL writer who was then covering the Jags for The Florida Times-Union. “They thought because Mort had access to all this information around the league, they could use that. But the reality was nobody was going to tell him anything now that he worked for a team.”

Plus, Kremer points out, “Mort was always a reporter at heart.”

The lone stain on Mort’s Hall of Fame résumé — he received the Dick McCann award in Canton in 2016 — arrived a few years later, after his initial report of the Patriots’ use of underinflated footballs during the early days of the Deflategate scandal later proved inaccurate. The ire of New England’s fan base trailed him for years, and Mort, by then undergoing treatment for cancer, said he received death threats. He later acknowledged errors in his reporting.

“Nothing really got to him, but when you hear vicious things about your family, things that got overtly personal, anybody would be bothered by that,” Markman says. “It got pretty bad.”

The tributes poured in after Mort passed away on March 3 at 72.

On his show, Dan Patrick told a story from his “SportsCenter” days. Mort had a scoop, and before running the story, the bosses wanted confirmation from another source. “We don’t need another source,” Patrick told them. “It’s Mort.”

“A GOAT,” Eisen called him on his show. “A trailblazer.”

Like Jeremiah, it hit Schefter hardest on draft weekend. For 15 years, they’d covered the event side-by-side. Now Mort wasn’t there.

“It was my honor,” Schefter says, “to sit next to one of the legendary figures in sports journalism for as long as I did.”

ESPN paid tribute. Booger McFarland remembered the nerves that accompanied one of his early appearances on TV and the encouraging words that came from Mort after he finished. “You don’t know how much that meant to a guy just starting in this business,” McFarland said. Louis Riddick remembered all the meetings they sat in together. “If you were talking football, and Mort was nodding his head, that was affirmation you knew what you were talking about,” he said.

On his way into Detroit for this year’s draft, Schefter was talking with his driver, Sean Malone, about how weird it would be covering the event without Mort.

“God, I loved that guy,” Malone told him.

“We all did,” Schefter replied.

Then Malone shared his own Mort story. He’d driven him to and from the airport dozens of times, mostly for the draft. And each year, after it was finished, Mort would hand him a $100 bill and tell him and the other drivers to go out and enjoy a few beers on him.

“No, no, no, I can’t take this,” Malone told him at first.

Mort wouldn’t hear it.

“Take it,” he said. “And send me a picture in a few hours so I know you guys are having a good time.”

So they did, year after year. It became a tradition.

Schefter heard that story and took the lesson to heart, one more assist from his mentor and friend. When Malone dropped Schefter off at the airport after the draft finished, Schefter handed Malone a $100 bill.

“This is from Mort,” Schefter told him.

(Photo illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; top photo courtesy of ESPN)

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Culture

Mets shouldn't be buyers. They should be aggressive buyers at the deadline

Published

3 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Press Room

Mets shouldn't be buyers. They should be aggressive buyers at the deadline

NEW YORK — On Wednesday, in discussing how his bullpen plans shift moment to moment over a nine-inning game, Carlos Mendoza chuckled at the idea of forming a pregame plan and sticking to it.

“I don’t know that there’s ever a time you come up with a game plan and stick to it,” the Mets manager said. “Every time you make an adjustment because the game unfolds. … You have an idea, but then you have to make adjustments.”

Perhaps Mendoza’s boss, David Stearns, should take that advice when it comes to this season.

The Mets entered 2024 with a clear, consistent plan from ownership down to the clubhouse. While they did not possess the high expectations of previous spring trainings, they thought they could be legitimate contenders for the postseason while preserving a sustained window of contention in the future. And here they are, days ahead of the trade deadline, as legitimate contenders for the postseason who have preserved a sustained window of contention in the future.

But after another memorable win Thursday night, a walk-off 3-2 victory over Atlanta that felt like the inverse of so many nightmarish nights at Turner Field, maybe it’s time for Stearns and the New York front office to get a little greedy about 2024. Yes, the Mets are going to be buyers at the trade deadline. But let’s make a case for the Mets to do more than add a reliever in the next week, a case for the Mets to be aggressive buyers like they last were en route to an unexpected pennant in 2015.

The Mets are good enough

Let’s do some blind resumes for teams on the morning of July 26 over the years.

Blind resumes

Team	W Advertisement	L	Pct. Advertisement	RD	NL Rank	GB of Playoffs Advertisement
A	56	46	0.549 Advertisement	85	5	—
B	55 Advertisement	47	0.539	9	T5	— Advertisement
C	55	47	0.539	49 Advertisement	T3	—
D	54	48 Advertisement	0.529	23	5	—
E Advertisement	50	46	0.521	46	7 Advertisement	0.5
F	48	51	0.485 Advertisement	36	10	6

OK, blindfolds off! What do those pretty similar teams all have in common? They all won the pennant.

NL pennant-winners (plus the Mets)

W	L Advertisement	Pct.	RD Advertisement	NL Rank	GB of Playoffs
56 Advertisement	46	0.549	85	5	— Advertisement
55	47	0.539	9	T5 Advertisement	—
55	47	0.539	49 Advertisement	T3	—
54	48	0.529 Advertisement	23	5	—
50	46 Advertisement	0.521	46	7	0.5
48 Advertisement	51	0.485	36	10	6 Advertisement

They were also pretty aggressive at the trade deadline. I classified the 2018 Dodgers (Manny Machado) and 2022 Phillies (David Robertson, Brandon Marsh and Noah Syndergaard) as All-in Buyers — teams that surrendered significant prospect capital for the present. The 2019 Nationals added three relievers, including the guy who would record the final out of the World Series. In 2021, Atlanta brought in four outfielders, including the NLCS and World Series MVPs. In 2023, Arizona dealt for a closer to better position itself for the postseason.

(For what it’s worth, the 2015 Mets, another All-in Buyer, were 50-48 with a negative-seven run differential on July 26.)

No, the Mets lack the kind of rotation and bullpen you generally rely on to carry you in October. However, New York possesses an offense that appears built for the postseason. As evidenced by its bashing of Gerrit Cole twice in the last month, the Mets’ lineup can go deep with the best of them. Only Baltimore has hit more homers since the Mets’ hot streak started May 30, and they’re tied for fourth in the majors in homers on the season — ahead of everyone but the Dodgers in the National League. On Thursday, New York was in the game against a dominant Chris Sale because Francisco Lindor turned one Sale mistake into two Mets runs.

Homers carry offenses come October. The similarly productive but differently constituted offense in 2022 tied for 15th in the league in home runs, then watched Atlanta and San Diego outhomer it in the biggest games of the season. This Mets offense can swing a short series with its power.

The National League is open

Here’s an important caveat: If I covered the Pirates or the Reds or the Padres or the Diamondbacks, I’d probably be making the exact same case. Because the National League is as open as it’s been in years.

Los Angeles and Atlanta have been the two best teams in the senior circuit for the last several seasons. Both are enduring more turbulent regular seasons than they’re accustomed to. The Dodgers continue to have health questions about their rotation, a dynamic that doomed them last October. Atlanta’s best hitter and best pitcher are out for the season. Its lineup looks like a shell of what the Mets are used to confronting.

While the Phillies have taken the mantle of the NL’s team to beat, they’re a team the Mets are pretty good at beating. They memorably went 14-5 against Philadelphia in 2022, and even during a down 2023 went 6-7 against it. This year, the Mets are 2-4 against the Phillies. And remarkably, since the start of the 2022 season, New York is 10-3 when facing either Aaron Nola or Zack Wheeler.

The timing actually clicks

It’s really tempting for teams to try manipulating their window of contention — to be cautious this year to put more eggs in a basket down the line. In doing so, however, they often miss the year to win.

The 2015 Mets could have been more cautious: Syndergaard and Steven Matz were rookies, Wheeler was hurt, the NL had several very good teams — surely the Mets’ best chance to advance in October would be down the road? As it turns out, that young rotation was never as healthy or as dominant as it was right then and there, and the Mets’ aggressiveness paid off in a pennant.

(Contrast that with the 2013-2015 Pirates, who never made the big move to push a very good team over the top. They still haven’t won a postseason series since 1979.)

For the Mets, it’s also fair to ask: What year, specifically, are they waiting for? Injuries to some key prospects this year mean New York won’t head into spring training 2025 planning to give an everyday spot to a talented rookie. The full incorporation of guys like Jett Williams, Drew Gilbert, Luisangel Acuña and Ryan Clifford won’t happen until 2026 — by which point Lindor will be 32 and Brandon Nimmo 33, on the outskirts of their primes.

The goal is to open a sustained window of contention and pounce on legitimate opportunities to win divisions, pennants and championships. The Mets are there. The two players they have signed long-term are having career-best years. Their cornerstone first baseman might not be here next year.

The window of contention is already open.

What does this mean?

Let’s be honest: This is where most columns like this end. There’s all that reasoning for going for it, now it’s Stearns’ job to turn that into something.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the current shape of the deadline market makes it difficult to go for it. Teams like the Pirates and Reds and Padres and Diamondbacks are all still in it in the National League, and the number of sellers is tinier than usual. The best starter likely to be traded may not be able to start much more this season. The best reliever likely to be traded has a walk rate you wouldn’t comfortably hit on in blackjack.

It’s harder to provide the kind of blueprint for the deadline that I do for the offseason because acquisition costs in trades are so much more difficult to project than open-market salaries. So I’ll settle for suggestions that would fit more of an all-in approach.

1. Engage the White Sox on Garrett Crochet with the understanding you’d be acquiring him to pitch out of the bullpen in 2024. The Athletic reported Thursday that Crochet would prefer to stay on a starter’s schedule (albeit with limited innings) down the stretch of this season unless an acquiring team signs him to a contract extension.

As I outlined Thursday morning, the Mets could use a long-term ace. Here’s a 25-year-old left-handed All-Star who leads the league in strikeouts and is interested in a long-term extension. Those all feel like good things. (Like Wheeler, Crochet’s likely arbitration salaries for the next two seasons will be suppressed by his lack of availability up to this point in his career. Thus, a long-term extension would cost less against the luxury tax than it might otherwise.)

Trade for Crochet, extend him and make him a multi-inning reliever with scheduled appearances the rest of the way. Imagine him coming in behind your right-handed starters in the postseason and serving as a one-man bridge to Edwin Díaz. Put him back in the rotation in 2025 and beyond. That might be worth the significant package of prospects it would require, as it would mean the Mets wouldn’t have to dive into the deep end of the starting pitching market this winter for a free agent already in his 30s.

2. If Crochet proves too much, combine a rotation upgrade — chiefly, a pitcher who misses more bats than the current starters — with two additions in the pen and one to the bench.

In the rotation, Detroit’s Jack Flaherty and Toronto’s Yusei Kikuchi come to mind. Flaherty will cost a good amount, but he too could become a viable option to re-sign.

For the bullpen, one high-leverage lefty should be the priority. Scroll past Tanner Scott to his teammate Andrew Nardi or to The Athletic’s years-long target Andrew Chafin of the Tigers. Another multi-inning arm could help keep the group fresh, as well. Cincinnati’s Buck Farmer or Detroit’s Alex Faedo could work there.

The final piece would be a versatile bench contributor who could protect the Mets against regression or injury at a few different positions. Detroit’s Andy Ibañez, Tampa Bay’s Amed Rosario, Toronto’s Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Oakland’s Abraham Toro could fit that role.

(Photo of José Buttó: Adam Hunger / Getty Images)

Culture

A history of spying in football: Drones, interns at training and kit men in ceilings

Published

11 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Press Room

A history of spying in football: Drones, interns at training and kit men in ceilings

Are not even the Olympic Games sacrosanct?

Yeah, you’re right. Probably not, given their long history of judging corruption, state boycotts and widespread doping.

But the news which broke on Tuesday, three days before the opening ceremony and hours before the first action in the 2024 Games’ football tournament, meant that the cherished Olympic values of fair play stood in tatters even before organisers emblazoned that message across the Parisien sky and the River Seine.

That it was Canada who performed such an egregious breach of the rules — by all stereotypes a country known for its people being polite, respectful, laidback and just terribly nice — only adds to the ironic drama.

There are five rings in the Olympic logo — take just two of them intertwined, and they resemble a pair of binoculars.

So this is what happened…

On Tuesday, at a training session ahead of their opening match of the group stage in Saint-Etienne on Thursday, staff members from the New Zealand women’s football team noticed a drone hovering above them.

Bev Priestman, the Canada coach, watching her team in action earlier this year (Jason Mowry/Getty Images)

They called the on-site police, who detained the device’s operator, who was later revealed to be a staff member from the Canadian team, the reigning Olympic women’s champions, and their opponents in that opener today.

In an initial statement, the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) apologised — but more was to come.

The following day, it became clear that there had been two drone incidents, with the other taking place five days earlier, on July 19. Now facing severe sanctions, the COC needed to act.

Joseph Lombardi, an “unaccredited analyst”, and Jasmine Mander, a member of the coaching staff who oversees Lombardi, have been removed from the team and sent home and Canada’s English head coach Beverly Priestman has voluntarily stepped down from being on the touchline for the New Zealand game.

“On behalf of our entire team, I first and foremost want to apologize to the players and staff at New Zealand Football and to the players on Team Canada,” Priestman said. “This does not represent the values that our team stand for.”

That final sentence is a little difficult to justify, given that spying on another team’s training is hardly an accidental action — nobody finds themselves flying a $2,000 piece of tech over their next opponents — twice — by mistake. Rather, it comes as a product of culture and command.

“I am ultimately responsible for conduct in our program,” Priestman added. “Accordingly, to emphasize our team’s commitment to integrity, I have decided to voluntarily withdraw from coaching the match on Thursday. In the spirit of accountability, I do this with the interests of both teams in mind and to ensure everyone feels that the sportsmanship of this game is upheld.”

This may be new to the Olympics — but spying in football is old business.

Teams sending scouts to watch the next side they are going to play at training probably predates the invention of the offside rule. In fairness, though, we do not know if ancient Olympian Theagenes of Thasos sent emissaries to watch Arrichion of Phigalia working on his moves.

Didier Deschamps, the France head coach, spotted a drone over training at the 2014 World Cup (Martin Rose/Getty Images)

In international football, France men’s manager Didier Deschamps noticed a drone above his players as they trained at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil — it was never discovered which, if any, of their group-stage rivals Ecuador, Honduras and Switzerland it belonged to.

Go back two more decades and ahead of a vital away World Cup qualifier against Norway in 1993, England manager Graham Taylor was so convinced his team were being watched that he moved their training base to a military facility. The issue? That new location was near the house of the chief sportswriter of one of Norway’s leading newspapers, who subsequently published their tactics the next morning. England lost, 2-0, in Oslo, ended up missing out on the 1994 World Cup, and Taylor got sacked.

Similarly, in a case of paranoia outweighing perspective, the Chilean football federation once sent up their own device to destroy a drone hovering over their session before a match against Argentina. It was perhaps football’s first case of aerial warfare since Roy Keane’s infamous tackle on Alfie Haaland. In this case, it turned out the questionable drone was a surveying tool being used by a Chilean telecommunications company.

But there is one example of spying which did emanate from South America — when, in early 2019, Leeds United’s Argentine head coach Marcelo Bielsa admitted sending an intern to watch the following weekend’s opponents Derby County work on their formation, set pieces and so on. It was not the first time.

“We watched training sessions of all the opponents before we played them,” Bielsa, now Uruguay’s head coach said. In Argentina, this practice was common apparently, and one he had continued after coming to work in Europe.

Officers have just attended the Training Ground for @dcfcofficial After a suspicious male was seen at the perimeter fence. Excellent searching conducted & male was located. All checks above board!
Keeping the team safe to bring home a win against #LUFC on 11th! #SpyingIsCheating pic.twitter.com/a12Zj8gISX
— Derby Response – This account is closing (@DerbyResponse) January 10, 2019

Derby and Frank Lampard, their manager at the time, were furious. When Bielsa rang the former Chelsea and England midfielder to explain himself, there was no apology — but instead, in broken English, he attempted to remove any ambiguity around the circumstances.

Leeds won the ensuing match, 2-0 — and the following week, Bielsa held an unprecedented press conference for local journalists, 66 minutes long, in which he used a PowerPoint presentation to demonstrate the full extent of the analysis he carried out on opposition clubs.

For Bielsa, who held open training sessions throughout his time at Athletic Bilbao in Spain, watching teams going through their tactical preparations like this was not spying, but simply gathering information.

Leeds’ Bielsa, centre, admitted spying on Lampard, right, and Derby (Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)

It was later pointed out by Leeds fans that, as a player, Lampard has been part of a Chelsea side which profited from similar, um, info-gathering missions.

In an interview with UK newspaper the Telegraph, former Chelsea manager Andre Villas-Boas admitted that, in his time as an assistant at the London club under Jose Mourinho, he would “travel to training grounds, often incognito, and look at our opponents’ mental and physical state before drawing my conclusions”. Chelsea won the Premier League title twice with Mourinho and Villas-Boas in situ.

Given the amount of information that rival clubs can draw on, some coaches are simply not too bothered by allegations of spying. In 2018, German Bundesliga side Werder Bremen used a drone to spy on Hoffenheim — but Hoffenheim’s coach Julian Nagelsmann, now manager of Germany’s national team, brushed off its impact.

“I’m not really angry at the analyst doing his job,” Nagelsmann said, before adding it was “commendable” that Bremen were going to such lengths to try to win.

Similarly, in the aftermath of the Leeds incident, former striker Gary Taylor-Fletcher recalled an incident from his Lincoln City side’s 2003-04 League Two play-off semi-final second leg away to Huddersfield Town.

While the Lincoln players were receiving their half-time team talk, Taylor-Fletcher tweeted, a polystyrene ceiling tile broke and then fell down — revealing the sizable heft of longtime Huddersfield kit man Andy Brook listening from the cavity above. Lincoln went on to lose the tie, while their opponents lost their dignity — but did end up getting promoted. And Taylor-Fletcher can’t have been too annoyed because, a year later, he left Lincoln for… Huddersfield.

Football is not alone in this sort of espionage — and other sports can be much more high-tech.

The McLaren Formula 1 team were given the largest fine in sporting history — $100million — and thrown out of the sport’s 2007 Constructors’ Championship after senior engineer Mike Coughlan received technical design documents which had been leaked from rivals Ferrari.

There have also been several high-profile incidents in American football.

Also in 2007, the New England Patriots, the most successful NFL team of recent years with six Super Bowl wins since the turn of the century, were punished for recording the defensive signals given to players during a game by coaches of the New York Jets. New England’s legendary head coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000 — the maximum allowed by the league, and the most in NFL history — while the team were denied their first-round pick in the following year’s player draft.

Belichick in 2007, when his team were caught recording the New York Jets’ defensive signals (AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)

Does cheating prosper? Well, New England won all 16 games in the 2007 regular season — but were surprisingly beaten in the Super Bowl by the New York Giants.

And it’s not just the professionals in the gridiron game. Last October, the University of Michigan’s head coach Jim Harbaugh was suspended over a similar sign-stealing scandal which quickly escalated to involve allegations also levelled at several other college teams. Harbaugh was banned for several games, but Michigan went on to win the U.S. college national championship on his return. Harbaugh has since moved on to become head coach of the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers.

So this is the bottom line: teams cheat.

In a multimillion (or even billion) dollar/pound/euro industry, marginal gains like those detailed here are worth the risk of detection. For every Canada, Leeds and Michigan caught, there are clubs and sides whose operatives get away with it.

Widespread but not necessarily endemic, it is both serious and not serious, funny and infuriating, the natural by-product of a game being taken as lifeblood.

Back in the ancient Olympics, contemporary accounts reveal athletes being bribed to say they were from certain city-states rather than others — facing a potential punishment of public flogging if they were caught.

Things have not really changed — and the punishment, at least to the guilty party’s public reputation, is not so different either.

Teams are willing to run that risk.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

Culture

Esteban Ocon joins Haas F1 for 2025 season

Published

18 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Press Room

Esteban Ocon joins Haas F1 for 2025 season

Esteban Ocon will race for Haas in Formula One from 2025 after signing a multi-year deal with the American team.

Haas announced on Thursday ahead of this weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix that Ocon, 27, would complete its line-up for next year alongside British rookie Oliver Bearman, who will graduate from Formula Two.

The Frenchman will become the first grand prix winner to race for Haas, and the move sees him reunite with Ayao Komatsu, Haas’s team principal, who served as his engineer for his maiden F1 test with Lotus back in 2014.

Ocon said in a statement that he and Haas had enjoyed “honest and fruitful discussions these last few months” about the future, and that he would be “joining a very ambitious racing team, whose spirit, work ethic, and undeniable upward trajectory has really impressed me.”

The move means Haas will run an all-new F1 line-up for 2025 as Ocon and Bearman replace Nico Hulkenberg and Kevin Magnussen, both of whom were already confirmed to be leaving the team.

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“The experience he brings, not just from his own talent base but also from working for a manufacturer team, will be advantageous to us in our growth as an organization,” Komatsu said of Ocon.

“It was vital we had a driver with experience in beside Oliver Bearman next year, but Esteban’s only 27 — he’s still young with a lot to prove as well. I think we have a hungry, dynamic driver pairing.”

What led Ocon to Haas?

Since Ocon announced in June that he would be leaving Alpine upon the expiration of his contract at the end of the season, Haas has always looked like his most likely destination.

Ocon was always going to be part of what is proving to be a very fluid F1 driver market for 2025, offering race-winning experience to any interested teams after his shock victory for Alpine at the 2021 Hungarian Grand Prix.

There were talks with a number of teams over a potential drive for next year, with Williams previously holding an interest in him as an alternative to its top target — Carlos Sainz.

Ocon is currently racing with Alpine (Bryn Lennon – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images)

But it became clear in recent weeks that a deal with Haas was close to being finalized, particularly after the team confirmed Magnussen’s departure in Hungary.

Ocon said last week it was “very clear what our intentions are for the future,” with the hope of getting a deal announced before the summer break, which starts next week.

He will join a Haas team currently enjoying an upswing in performance under Komatsu. It lies seventh in the constructors standings, and has already scored more than double its points tally from the entirety of last year.

A fresh start for Ocon

The move will serve as a new beginning to Ocon, whose final season with Alpine has proven to be a frustrating one.

Between the team’s lack of performance and tension with teammate Pierre Gasly that flared after their collision on the opening lap in Monaco, there was always the feeling a chapter was ending, even prior to news of Ocon’s departure.

This move will end Ocon’s long-standing relationship with the Enstone-based team, known previously as Renault and Lotus, which began more than 10 years ago. He joined their junior academy at 14, but their financial issues led Mercedes to take him under its wing.

Mercedes helped Ocon get onto the F1 grid in 2016 and quickly win praise for his performances and consistency while driving for Force India, leading to him even being a consideration for a Mercedes F1 seat in 2020 as teammate to Lewis Hamilton.

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But he was never seriously on Mercedes’ radar this time around as they look to replace Hamilton, with the vacant seat likely to go to its 17-year-old protege, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who is racing in F2.

With Haas, Ocon will get long-term stability and, for the first time in his career, have the chance to help build a team up by serving as the experienced head alongside a much younger teammate in Bearman.

(Andrea Diodato/NurPhoto via Getty Images)