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FIFA suspended Canada women’s soccer coach Bev Priestman for one year, deducted six points from the team’s Olympic group stage total and issued a fine on Saturday in response to Canada flying a drone over New Zealand’s training sessions before the start of the Games.

The punishment immediately and severely hurt the chances for a second consecutive gold medal for Canada, which won the Olympic tournament in Tokyo in 2021, a run that was immediately questioned as the drone scandal emerged.

Canada Soccer and the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) are exploring appeals to FIFA’s decision concerning the six docked points, viewing it as “excessively punitive” to the players, they said in statements Saturday.

“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,” COC CEO David Shoemaker said.

The user of the drone in the incident that kicked off a large-scale investigation into Canada Soccer, team analyst Joseph Lombardi, was suspended for one year, as was assistant coach Jasmine Mander. The chairman of the FIFA appeal committee issued the decision.

FIFA found violations of article 13 of its code of conduct and article 6.1 of the Olympic football tournament regulations, both related to fair play. FIFA also noted that the decision was made — very quickly — because of its impact on the outcome of the ongoing Olympic tournament. Canada, in Group A, won its opener against New Zealand 2-1, and plays host France on Sunday.

FIFA’s fine is 200,000 Swiss francs, equivalent to $312,700 Canadian (or roughly $225,000 U.S.), another blow for a federation that has struggled financially over the course of the past year.

While the incident occurred at the Olympics, and the International Olympic Committee could also impose its own sanctions, FIFA also has jurisdiction as the international governing body, as it has “control and direction” of the Olympic tournaments for both the men and women.

New Zealand had directly requested that FIFA not award Canada any points for its victory over the Ferns in the group stage in the lead-up to Saturday’s decision. New Zealand commended the “swift action” taken against Canada but said it still believes Canada had “an unfair sporting advantage gained by filming our key tactical sessions.”

“It’s disappointing that New Zealand has been placed in such a position by actions of this nature, that impact the entire tournament, but now our focus is firmly on our remaining games against Colombia and France,” New Zealand Football said in a statement Saturday.

Canada Soccer could ask for a “motivated decision,” which would include a greater explanation of FIFA’s ruling that would be publicly posted on FIFA’s legal homepage, and the decision could also be appealed before the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Canada could still advance out of Group A (which includes France, Colombia and New Zealand) if it wins all three of its matches to earn three points through the end of the group stage, depending on other results. With the limited size of the Olympic tournament at 12 teams, eight must advance — which means the top two third-place teams make it to the quarterfinals. There’s even a remote chance for Canada to advance on a single point, though it would have to rely on other poor performances and goal differentials to get through.

Canada Soccer removed Priestman from the Olympics on Friday, saying “additional information” came to light regarding previous drone use against opponents before the Paris Games. The federation has promised to perform its own investigation across the entirety of its program.

Canada Soccer CEO Kevin Blue said that based on what he had learned so far, he was concerned there was “a potential long-term, deeply embedded systemic culture” of surveillance of other teams.

Canada Soccer had hoped to avoid any direct repercussions for the team in France. Blue stressed multiple times that players were unaware of any drone use, and should not be punished.

“Specifically, we do not feel that a deduction of points in this tournament would be fair to our players, particularly in light of the significant and immediate steps we’ve taken to address the situation,” he said Friday. Blue used this same argument again in his statement on Saturday: “Canada Soccer took swift action to suspend the implicated staff members and is also proceeding with a broad independent review that may lead to further disciplinary action.”

The joint decision to appeal FIFA’s decision, specifically on the grounds of the six points docked for Canada’s group stage play, is unsurprising but may not prove successful. FIFA’s disciplinary committee was largely concerned only with what happened at the Olympics over the past week. While players did not participate in the use of drones or other wrongdoing, they still potentially — if unwittingly — benefitted from their use.

After staff members for the New Zealand team reported a drone flying above their practice in Saint-Étienne on July 22, they notified local police. Lombardi, an “unaccredited analyst” with Canada’s women’s team, was detained, and law enforcement found footage from a previous New Zealand training session on July 19.

Canada Soccer attempted to head off any further punishment by sending Lombardi and Mander (the assistant coach he reported to) back home. Priestman also announced she would not coach in Canada’s opening match against New Zealand.

But the situation advanced quickly.

Blue said he was aware of multiple incidents across the program based on anecdotal evidence — including an attempt to use a drone to watch an opponent’s training session at Copa America.

A representative for Priestman told The Athletic that she was shocked and devastated by FIFA’s decision.

(Photo: Vaughn Ridley / Getty Images)

American tennis star Coco Gauff revealed a dire bathroom situation while she and her teammates were at the Olympic Village in Paris at the start of the Summer Games on Saturday.

Gauff posted a TikTok video showing the cramped situation with her teammates.

“10 girls, two bathrooms,” she screen-capped the video, which showed several women doing their hair and makeup and trying to get ready in several rooms.

Gauff wrote in a separate comment, “all the tennis girls moved to a hotel except me. so now just 5 girls two bathrooms.”

The tennis star said she borrowed a mattress topper from the archery team to help her sleep on the cardboard beds.

Coco Gauff speaks to the media ahead of the Olympic Games on July 25, 2024, in Paris. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

PARIS 2024 OFFICIAL BELIEVES OPENING CEREMONY GOAL OF SHOWING COMMUNITY TOLERANCE WAS ACHIEVED DESPITE FUROR

The Olympic Village has been a hot topic ahead of the Paris Olympics. The apparently cramped conditions were one thing, but the no air conditioning rule sparked another problem.

Paris 2024 organizers didn’t put air conditioning units inside rooms in the village. A cooling system was put together, using naturally cold water from 70 meters deep that will be circulated in the flooring of the buildings to reduce the temperature in the apartments.

The decision is part of the organizing committee’s goal to cut the carbon footprint of the Paris Games by half and stage the most sustainable Olympics to date by installing a special technology to use natural sources to keep everyone cool even during a potential heat wave.

Coco Gauff celebrates her announcement as the U.S. flag bearer at the Team USA Welcome Experience on July 23, 2024 in Paris. (Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for USOPC)

The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee allowed its athletes to bring personal cooling units.

Fox News’ Ryan Morik contributed to this report.

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When John Roethlisberger was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, he and his gymnastics teammates vanned to meets at Iowa, at Iowa State, at UW Oshkosh and Wisconsin. Every year, they’d fly to Michigan, where they’d compete against the Wolverines on a Friday night and head to Michigan State on a Sunday.

Of those teams, only Michigan continues to sponsor the sport today. This is not breaking news. The decline of men’s gymnastics has been both ongoing and relentless, a death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts slashing that has pushed it to near extinction. Only 12 Division-I universities now sponsor men’s teams, none do at the D2 level and just three in D3. All of 319 men competed in NCAA gymnastics this past season.

The danger of real elimination, though, has never been more real than it is now. With payouts to athletes about to come due from a recent House settlement, athletic departments are looking to pinch pennies. Sport elimination remains a real threat and, with so few viable teams and athletes already, men’s gymnastics is ripe for the picking.

Yet the college system still serves as the direct feeder for international competition. In Paris, the United States is fielding its strongest men’s Olympics team in decades, with legitimate aspirations to make a team podium for the first time in 16 years. All five men headed to Paris come via the college route — Asher Hong and Frederick Richard remain in college, at Stanford and Michigan, respectively. Paul Juda wrapped up his eligibility with the Wolverines this year and Brody Malone with the Cardinal a year ago. Pommel horse specialist Stephen Nedoroscik lost his senior season at Penn State to COVID-19.

USA Gymnastics desperately needs the college system. But can the USA gymnasts, with a successful run at Paris, help save college gymnastics?

“This team could do a lot. They are the tip of the spear,” says Roethlisberger, a three-time Olympian who remains outraged at his alma mater’s decision to eliminate gymnastics in 2020. “We have athletes who can absolutely win medals, but will they be the darlings of these Olympics? Probably not.

“We are on the precipice of catastrophic change in college sports. So who is going to stand up and say, ‘I’m going to show the world how this can actually work?’ Our athletes can do a lot, but they can’t do it alone.”

Thom Glielmi used to scam money off his pals, taking $10 bets that he couldn’t flip off whatever he could find — the roof of a garage, for example. He did it largely for the thrill, but then he spied the gymnastics equipment at Lincoln-Way Central High School in Illinois and realized he could put his flipping to good use. He ditched baseball, signed up for gymnastics and found himself a life. A former gymnast at Southern Illinois, Glielmi is now in Year 22 at Stanford, where this year he led the Cardinal to its seventh national championship.

“If my high school didn’t have gymnastics, I’m not sure what would have become of me,” Glielmi says.

It’s the same question he asks when he hits the recruiting trail now: What’s to become of the boys who want to compete? In 1982, around the time Glielmi was flipping his way through Lincoln-Way, more than 75 colleges and universities sponsored men’s gymnastics, and in 1984 one of them — UCLA — supplied three members of the United States team that captured Olympic gold. A decade later, the Bruins program was eliminated. By 2002, only 21 teams remained at the collegiate level.

The initial culprit — or at least the easy blame — was Title IX. Forget that Title IX didn’t make a whole lot of sense as a counterargument — gymnastics, unlike, say, football, offers a women’s equivalent — but athletic directors, looking for easy fixes to federal equivalency regulations, slashed the sport in big numbers in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

COVID brought another wave, and now men’s gymnastics has fewer NCAA teams than water polo.

“So many guys, I just feel terrible for them,” Glielmi says. “The competition is so high, and there’s just nowhere for some of these athletes to go.”

No surprise, then, that as the college opportunities dry up, so too does the interest. Men’s gymnastics always has fought an uphill battle. Roethlisberger came to his sport naturally. His father, Fred, was a 1968 Olympian and spent three decades as the head coach at Minnesota; his big sister, Marie, was a 1984 Olympian. He also knows he is the exception. Roethlisberger speaks regularly at awards dinners and camps and often opens with a favorite joke. He describes the giddy joy of a delivery room, where a newly proud papa grabs his infant son and declares, “I finally got my gymnast!” He laughs at his gallows humor.

“It’s the truth,” he says. “Those are the norms of our society. Most little girls try gymnastics at some point. They dream about bows in their hair and sparkles on their leotards. Little boys dream about playing football, baseball or basketball.”

There are, in truth, plenty of ancillary things at play here. Societal norms indeed feed popularity. “You can see more cornhole on TV now than men’s gymnastics,” Roethlisberger says. Even physiology has a role. “You have to be strong (to do this sport),” says Gina Pongetti, a physical therapist and owner of MedGym, who has worked in gymnastics for more than 20 years, “and many of them aren’t right away, so they get frustrated and quit.”

But largely it is the intersection of opportunity and cash. Roethlisberger has a summer camp, Flipfest, in Tennessee that attracts 400 kids on average per week. Fifteen percent of them are boys, a minority but still a solid number. The Tennessee Secondary School Association does not sponsor boys gymnastics, and, according to the most recent National Federation of High Schools participation report, not a single of its member high schools in Tennessee offers it.

In fact, only 100 do nationwide, with just 986 high school-aged boys competing. So, are colleges no longer funding gymnastics because there are no gymnasts to fund, or are there fewer gymnasts because there’s nowhere to go? Most people associated with the sport believe it’s the latter. Gymnastics is not cheap. A conservative estimate for competitive gymnastics runs $500 per month.

Yet the return on that investment is opportunity at just 15 schools — and only 6.3 scholarships available at each school.

“There’s an understandable quid pro quo,” Pongetti says. “The dollars and the time put into the gym, that turns into the college scholarship opportunity, but what if there’s no college scholarship or even opportunity to compete?”

Roethlisberger is in the thick of it. He has three boys. They’re enrolled in gymnastics, not just because their dad loves it but because he truly believes that its combination of strength and balance offers the best foundation for any sport. But he also knows that there could be a tipping point.

“They can love it all day long,” he says. “But then you start to look around and say, ‘Well, there’s nowhere to go. How about we try baseball or lacrosse?’”

Glielmi considers the number being tossed around as the likely sum necessary to fund athletes’ payments post-House settlement — $22 million. “That’s 22 gymnastics teams,” he says with a sigh. He’s not wrong. Men’s gymnastics is not a departmental money maker, which makes it an easy sport to slash. A glance at the NCAA reports filed by Penn State, Ohio State, Illinois and Oklahoma show deficits ranging from $600,000 to $1.9 million. It also, however, does not cost much, especially at places that have viable women’s programs and available practice gyms. The expenses at those same schools average around $1.3 million.

But the dearth of teams offering the sport combined with the need to shave spending puts men’s gymnastics in a vulnerable position.

“The less programs that stay, the easier it is to follow suit and chop,” says Pongetti. “It’s a dangerous, dangerous, domino effect.”

By and large, athletic directors have not been historically creative when faced with similar crises. Minnesota cut its men’s team in 2020 — per the NCAA report, it saved the school $748,167 in expenses. Administrators stood their ground even after the alumni rallied to offer to fund everything except coaching salaries and gym space. Instead, the alums, along with head coach Mike Burns, funded a club sport that this year included a roster of 25 that went on to win the club national title. Since 2021, the school provided gym space rent-free but in May announced it was reappropriating Cooke Hall to use for the diving team. The gymnasts have nowhere to go.

“This is the Titanic attempting to turn around in the Suez Canal,” Roethlisberger says. “Athletes are going to get paid from the school, so what are we going to do about it? There are ways. Engage the alumni. Huddle up. But what athletic director is going to stand up and say, ‘Here’s the new model?’ Who is going to be bold enough to do that?”

That it falls largely to the colleges is part of the problem. In many other countries, sports are government-funded. Here, many of the national governing bodies offer little if anything in the way of financial support, and rely instead on the college system as the feeder program. Fourteen U.S. teams headed to Paris, including men’s gymnastics, are made up entirely of NCAA athletes. More than 100 members of the track and field contingent come from the NCAA ranks, and 44 for swimming.

Minnesota’s program carries on with alumni support. Shane Wiskus, here at the 2021 NCAA championships, was a Tokyo Olympian. (Carlos Gonzalez / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

But there is no real reciprocity between the NCAA and the NGBs. A think tank commissioned by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee post-pandemic suggested such a partnership, and the two groups have discussed aligning forces. Nothing concrete yet has come out of it.

Men’s gymnastics is not entirely blameless. NCAA women’s gymnastics is growing. NIL opportunities have made staying in college more appealing to Olympic gymnasts — Team USA members Sunisa Lee, Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles all went to college — and their participation has helped raise the sport’s profile. The ACC and SEC Networks regularly broadcast meets and ABC aired the NCAA championship. The decision to stick to the more familiar scoring system — a 10 is perfect — has helped keep viewers engaged, as well as entertained. The men, on the other hand, use the open-scoring system, where a combination of difficulty and execution results in a final score.

There is ample evidence of interest. Richard has 670,000 TikTok followers and 310,000 more on Instagram. More than 50,000 follow Malone’s Insta account.

“We hear all the time that there’s a great product here,” Glielmi says. “We just haven’t put it together. If we can manage all of that and stay true to the sport, make it easier to understand, we’ve got a better chance of people sticking around.”

Which is where this men’s team comes in.

Americans love nothing more than winning, and the lack of medals has hurt men’s relevance. This team has the stuff to change that. After the Tokyo Olympics, the United States made a concerted effort to up the difficulty in its routines. At the 2020 Games, the U.S. started a full 6.5 points behind its competition because its sets weren’t properly stacked. Now they stand just two points behind Japan and 3.6 behind China, well within striking distance of the podium.

In Saturday’s qualification round, the U.S. qualified fifth for the team all-around. The final is Monday.

Along with his social media following, Richard brings legit hardware to Paris. He is only the fourth American man to medal in the all-around at the world championships — he won a bronze — and the first in a decade to medal in more than two world events. Malone, an Olympian in 2020, is back after a gruesome leg injury. He has a good shot at medaling on the high bar. Pommel horse specialist Nedoroscik is the 2021 world champion in that event.

Maybe more than anything, they understand their mission.

“That is my passion, and that is all of our responsibility — growing the sport,” says Richard. “All of the medals, the success, that’s what this is about. We grew up giving everything to gymnastics, and we want kids growing up to have way more colleges to select from, to be blessed with what they deserve.”

GO DEEPER

Fred Richard, after lifetime of handstands, is built to burst onto Olympics scene

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(Top photo of gymnast Paul Juda during U.S. Olympic trials: Elsa / Getty Images)