Watch the accompanying episode, produced in collaboration with Pablo Torre Finds Out on The Athletic Podcast Network, here. Subscribe to PTFO on YouTube, The Athletic or wherever you get your podcasts.
Just weeks before the start of the Winter Olympics, a cheating scandal that is equal parts bizarre and brazen, rocking one of its foundational sports and becoming a cause for national shame in Norway, has taken its latest turn.
On Thursday, after 11 months of investigation and litigation, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation’s (FIS) ethics committee handed down a harsh 18-month suspension to two disgraced former coaches and the former equipment manager of Norway’s ski jumping team. The trio admitted conspiring to manipulate the suits of the team’s top jumpers to help them beat the competition at the Nordic World Ski Championships in Trondheim, Norway, last year after a whistleblower filmed them through a curtain.
“In the panel’s view it is the fact of the violations, the admission of which was compelled by the video evidence, that justifies the imposition of the sentence,” the decision stated.
At the world championships, Magnus Brevig, the head coach of the Norwegian national team, and Adrian Livelten, the team’s suit technician, were caught on a video posted anonymously to YouTube inserting illegal stitching into the crotch area of the suits of two star jumpers, reigning Olympic champion Marius Lindvik and Johann André Forfang, after the suits had already passed inspection. The stitches essentially served to make the suits more aerodynamic, allowing the jumpers to fly farther than the competition.
The athletes claimed ignorance. The coaches backed those claims, and the athletes received suspensions of just three months, which they were able to serve during the summer. They are expected to compete in next month’s Winter Olympics.
Norway’s ski federation did not make Lindvik, 27, or Forfang, 30, available for this article. In an email, Jan-Erik Aalbu, the sporting director of Norway’s ski jumping team, wrote:
“It has now been more than nine months, and my focus is entirely on what lies ahead. We are entering a new, exciting, and important Olympic season, and all my energy is directed toward development, performance, and creating the best possible conditions for our athletes.”
In Norway, a proud Winter Olympic country that holds its reputation for rule-following almost as close to its heart as its century-long dominance of winter sports, the revelations struck at the heart of its national identity.
“I just thought that no, no, no, this is not possible,” said Erik Sandoy, a ski jumping enthusiast who was a major supporter of the federation when his son was a top athlete in Nordic combined, which involves both ski jumping and cross country.
In fact, yes, yes, yes.
In a searing ruling, the ethics committee echoed views that FIS officials and lawyers stated in multiple confidential documents in the case that The Athletic was able to review in recent days.
“Now is the appropriate time to put down a clear marker as to what is not acceptable in (ski jumping),” the ruling stated.
The ruling represented a significant win for FIS. The coaches and the staff technician argued to the committee that their behavior was in keeping with a sport where pushing the limits is a part of the culture. Also, they cited a list of recent examples of FIS looking the other way at equipment violations, or punishing them with only minor penalties, such as warnings or a disqualification from competition.
Marius Lindvik (left) and Johann André Forfang, at a World Cup competition in Sapporo, Japan, last February. (Richard A. Brooks / AFP via Getty Images)
The biggest difference in this case was the video, shot on the eve of the large hill jumping competition. It embarrassed FIS and ski jumping itself because it brought cheating that usually happens behind closed doors out in the open. But that shouldn’t be the cause for disproportionate penalty, the coaches argued.
The ethics committee disagreed, adopting the arguments of the confidential charging notice FIS delivered in August, which The Athletic has reviewed. In that document, Stephan Netzle, a lawyer for FIS, cited the findings of a confidential report, which found that efforts to cheat were unprecedented and far beyond previous equipment manipulation schemes.
“FIS considers the violation very serious because it violated the core principles of sporting competition, namely fairness, equal conditions and compliance with the rules,” Netzle wrote in the charging notice. “The manipulation compromised the result of one of the most prestigious competitions of FIS at the highest level and, had it not been discovered immediately, would have resulted in top ranks at a world championship being won fraudulently. In addition, the manipulation was not the act of one individual, but the result of the combined efforts of experienced officials familiar with the rules, who were responsible for an entire national team.”
Pål Kleven is a lawyer for Brevig who has worked closely with the attorneys for Livelten and Thomas Lobben, a Norwegian assistant head coach who was not on the video but later confessed to being involved. In a statement ahead of the ruling, Kleven wrote:
“The mere fact that the conduct was captured on film cannot, as a matter of principle, justify a fundamentally harsher reaction. To impose a lengthy professional ban under these circumstances runs counter to core legal principles such as proportionality, equal treatment, and foreseeability.”
He also pointed the finger at FIS.
“For years, the regulatory framework has been unclear, and enforcement inconsistent and often lenient. Statements from FIS’ own equipment controllers following the incident highlight how ad hoc and unreliable the control system has been. It is striking that FIS has yet to establish an independent, professional control body outside its own organization to ensure objectivity and predictability.”
Magnus Brevig (left) and Jan-Erik Aalbu address the media after the scandal broke at last March’s world championships. (Terje Pedersen / NTB / AFP via Getty Images)
That stance suggests that this story will continue. The coaches can appeal the ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland. It may be their last hope of working in sports again. They have largely been vilified at home and in the sport where they made their livelihood, unable to convince the public at large that this sort of rule-breaking has been a part of the ski jumping game basically forever.
That has been especially true in the last 10-15 years, when ski federations began employing sophisticated scientists to find every extra millimeter from their equipment, and FIS officials neglected to enforce the rules and penalize cheaters as seriously as they might have.
“We’re all responsible,” said Lasse Ottesen, a 1994 Olympic silver medalist in ski jumping who has led a working group charged with upgrading inspection protocols. “It’s a shared responsibility between the athletes and teams and FIS, for sure. So we are definitely involved in that. And we need to make sure that we also are aware of that responsibility of what has happened and also what we’re going to do in the future.”
Athletes and coaches have used everything from glue to hairspray to having athletes try to cover up how small they were and how large the suits were in the examination room. Why all the chicanery? Physics.
Ski jumpers want to fly through the air as far as possible. A bigger suit provides more lift, like a larger sail catches more wind and makes a boat travel faster than a smaller one. The easiest place to enlarge the suit to increase lift is in the crotch. Athletes are not allowed to wear jumping suits that are more than 4 centimeters larger than the surface area of their bodies. Studies have shown that an extra centimeter or two of material in the crotch area can give a jumper an extra five or six meters in length.
The smoothest, hardest possible material can also help, creating less drag as a ski jumper flies through the air. It’s the same reason swimmers shave their bodies before the most important competitions.
“It’s been a radical change in what I call the battle of millimeters,” Sandoy said. “You have all this technology that comes in and they’re testing, they’re using universities like a research department to find the right areas and testing a lot of material.”
That research has filtered down to coaches and athletes. Many have gotten caught, but none have received penalties like those meted out last week. FIS equipment inspectors have found multiple athletes wearing suits with enlarged crotch areas in recent years. There were warnings, disqualifications and private admonishments, but nothing on the order of what followed the release of the video last March.
The video and the embarrassment it caused the sport and its officials led FIS to completely revamp its monitoring system. The organization hired more equipment controllers and improved its training for them. It added more checkpoints for the suits and limited the number an athlete could use during the season.
“We have a totally different qualification system with how to get your suit approved,” Ottesen said.
What happened in Trondheim changed everything.
“The stretch of the material is quite elastic, and when we felt this suit, it was not elastic at all,” he said. “They had opened up the five different layers of the material. They had in that part entered in a different kind of material, a stiff material, then they had sewn back the material together and then sewn the suit together. So for a normal eye or even for our equipment controllers, not possible to see. So when you compare that to basically everything that we’ve seen in terms of equipment and suits. It’s on a totally different level of what has been done before.”
In an email to The Athletic last month, Kleven, the lawyer for the athletes, wrote that the coaches are fully aware they broke rules and admitted it.
“They argue that it is part of an established culture within ski jumping, one that has not previously been harshly penalized,” Kleven wrote. “They assert that it would be disproportionate to impose such a long period of ineligibility, which would effectively result in a career ban. … They could not have reasonably known that their actions would lead to such a harsh penalty, as the FIS has historically not enforced severe sanctions for similar offenses. The lack of predictability in FIS’s actions, they claim, further supports the argument that the proposed sanction is disproportionate.”
FIS officials, however, argued that the nature of the suit manipulation the Norwegians pursued was akin to doping, requiring a harsh penalty.
“Under the circumstances, the comparison with the duration of doping bans, i.e. the sanction for another attack on the core values of sport, is obvious,” said in a court document reviewed by The Athletic. “With standard suspensions of 24 months (specified substances) or 48 months (non-specified substances) for Anti-Doping Rule Violations, the proposed period of ineligibility of 18 months can be considered relatively lenient.”
The ruling of the FIS ethics committee agreed with that, to a large extent.
“Equipment doping has clear analogies in terms of its vice with doping by drugs,” the ruling stated.
The comparison to a doping violation, though, is problematic. Anti-doping rules prohibit athletes from claiming ignorance. They are almost always held entirely accountable for whatever substances end up in their bodies. Successfully blaming their coaches or physicians for giving them a performance-enhancing drug without their knowledge to receive a light penalty is extremely rare and only when the amount of the illegal substance found is consistent with unintentional and inadvertent use.
FIS officials have argued that the difference in this case is that the illegal substance was on the athletes’ bodies rather than inside them. The distinction is especially convenient with the Olympics approaching and FIS desperate to convince the world the competition is clean and fair.
Sandoy said Norwegians will be watching closely. Norwegian men don’t have a jumper in the top 10 in the overall World Cup standings this season. Its top-ranked female athlete is fourth. Forfang is 16th. Lindvik is 18th. Kristoffer Eriksen Sundal is their top performer, in 14th.
“Hopefully, we will get good Norwegian jumping results with the right kind of equipment,” Sandoy said.
Watch the accompanying episode, produced in collaboration with Pablo Torre Finds Out on The Athletic Podcast Network, here. Subscribe to PTFO on YouTube, The Athletic or wherever you get your podcasts.
