We travel back to 2000 for another look back at the Sydney 2000 Olympics and Paralympics. In this episode, Alison explores what’s considered to be the biggest Paralympic scandal of all time, Spain’s cheating in the basketball intellectual disabilities tournament. Then Jill looks at the Olympic road cycling events, which feature inspirational legends, amazing comebacks, and Lance Armstrong.
The biggest Paralympic scandal of all time: Basketball ID
Athletes with intellectual disabilities didn’t always participate in the Paralympics, but ID athletes had their own classification for swimming and athletics for Atlanta 1996. Those competitions went well, so Basketball ID was added to the program at Sydney 2000. Unfortunately, the result was a shocking cheating scandal that rocked the International Paralympic Committee.
Sometimes you hear about athletes lying about the extent of their disabilities in order to receive a certain classification. In May 2025, blind judoka Shahana Hajiyeva of Azerbaijan received a lifetime ban from the sport after it was discovered that she had full sight.
At Sydney 2000, the issue was with basketball ID, where Spain’s entire basketball ID team decided to pose as intellectually disabled. The team included journalist Carlos Ribagorda, who had gone undercover and joined the team in 1999 to investigate this situation. The situation quickly became messy, but Spain dominated the Sydney 2000 tournament and won the gold medal.
And that’s when their story unraveled.
Alison has the details of what went down when Spain decided to cheat the system–and how that affected ID sports in the Paralympic Movement after this. Needless to say, basketball ID is no longer on the Paralympic program.
Olympic road cycling at Sydney 2000: The cheats and the comeback queen
Then Jill looks at the Olympic road cycling competitions, some of which likely need to have a giant asterisk by them because we’re in the EPO era, where doping was rampant.
How bad was it? A Sportingintelligence investigation found that 65% (and likely more) of men’s cyclists were doping between 1998 and 2013. The biggest fallout came in 2012 after Lance Armstrong was found to have doped for years, including his run of consecutive Tour de France wins–but he didn’t admit it until 2013.
Of course, this affected the men’s competitions at the Sydney 2000 Olympics–but not until years later. Jill has the scoop, including who else likely was also under the influence and why the doping testing of the day wasn’t effective in catching bad actors. If you want a thoroughly depressing look at doping in cycling during this era, here’s a handy infographic.
Although cycling was an original Olympic sport, women didn’t get to compete in it until LA 1984–and one of those Olympians was still competing at Sydney 2000. Frenchwoman Jeannie Longo-Ciprelli, age 41, was back for her fifth Games, and she wanted to defend her gold medal in the road race.
However, Dutchwoman Leontien Zijlaard-van Moorsel was determined to get in her way. Zijlaard-van Moorsel raced against Longo in the early 1990s, but then she developed anorexia and retired to focus on her health. In the late 1990s, she got back on a bike and discovered she still enjoyed riding and still wanted to compete. In her Olympic comeback (she competed at Barcelona 1992), she was also seeking gold.
Zijlaard-van Moorsel had also opted to race in some track cycling competitions at Sydney 2000 and had some incredible successes. How would she fare on the road? And what about the home favorite Anna Wilson? Jill’s got the details, complete with continued inequality at the women’s races, bad weather, a photo finish, and surprise winners.
Find a complete list of sources used in this episode here.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!
TRANSCRIPT
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399-Sydney 2000: The Cover-Up and the Comebacks – Paralympic Basketball and Olympic Cycling
Jill Jaracz: Hello, and welcome to another history episode of Keep the Flame Alive, the podcast for fans of the Olympics and Paralympics. If you love the games, we are the show for you. I am your host, Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co-host, Alison Brown. Alison, hello, how are you?
Alison Brown: I am so depressed by my story.
You and me both. So yeah, we’re gonna be talking cheaters and cheaters and cheaters today.
Jill Jaracz: Y yeah. This was one month where I went. We called this the greatest games ever, huh? Okay.
Alison Brown: Well, uh, my story is the greatest cheating scandal ever. Apparently. That’s what people say. So greatest can be applied in many ways.
Join us for our 400th episode celebration!
Jill Jaracz: Well, we will get to that in a moment, but, you know, next episode will be a major milestone for us. We will have hit episode number 400 of our regular episodes, not including daily coverage. we’re super excited and really proud to, to hit this mark. We’ve been in the game a long time and not everybody stays in this long.
So we are really proud and grateful to you all for making this possible for everyone involved in having a great community to celebrate the gains with. We will be recording episode number 400 on Monday. July 14th. That is this coming Monday from eight to 10:00 PM Eastern. And we would love you to join us for that recording.
You will be able to hop in and out of the conversation as you are able to. So we will have a recording studio set up and uh, you can go to tiny url.com/ 400 party to get the link to join us. We can have like up to nine people total at a time. So, say hello, celebrate with us reminisce, talk about the future games and uh, just have a lot of fun.
or as Alison said
virtual pate.
Alison Brown: Oh, I thought I was gonna have to do that again. Live. I was ready. You know, and we have invited, um, some former guests who may. Pop in and out. So that would be lovely. That would be fun.
Jill Jaracz: so we are very excited to celebrate with you Again, that’s Monday, July 14th, from eight to 10:00 PM Eastern.
Find the link@tinyurl.com slash 400 party.
Sydney 2000 Paralympics: ID Basketball and the biggest Paralympic scandal of all time
Jill Jaracz: So this is our monthly, his history episode in which we look back at one particular games all throughout 2025. That games is Sydney 2000 as it’s the 25th anniversary of those games. games that IOC President Juan Antonio Samran said were the best ever. How, how often did he say
Alison Brown: that?
Pretty much to everybody but Atlanta.
Jill Jaracz: But because they kept getting better and better. Fair enough. But he really was, it did make a mark. So, uh, this month from the Paralympics, Alison is talking about intellectually disabled basketball. I am tackling Olympic Road cycling, Alison.
Alison Brown: Take it away.
Okay. So I did not remember this story at all, which surprises me because it is the biggest scandal pretty much in Paralympic history. And we start back in 1986 when the International Sports Federation for Athletes with Intellectual disabilities was formed and they wanted to encourage sport participation for people with intellectual disabilities.
They flip flop between ID and intellectual disabilities. So I’m probably gonna do the same as I’m, as I’m saying this over and over again. And in 1992, Inus held its own version of the Paralympics, and that sort of got the Paralympics attention, as we’ve seen before. People don’t like when you. Take their thunder.
And so the International Paralympic Committee decided to include ID swimming and athletics in Atlanta in 96. And Ina said, that’s great, but let’s do more, let’s have more, athletes with intellectual disabilities participating.
Jill Jaracz: and, and just to clarify, like this is different from Special Olympics because Special Olympics is really, anybody can come and participate this.
We have like a qualification system.
Alison Brown: Yes. So it’s the same qualification system as you would for any of the other classifications. So they still have to play international games. They still have to reach a certain level of elite competition. and for Sydney 2000, they decided to add basketball id, which is how it’s listed in all the records.
And just so we’re all talking the same words in this definition of intellectual disability, the IQ is below 70. Limitations in two or more adaptive skill areas with an onset prior to age 18. And adapted skill areas in this case would be things like focus, strategic thinking, appropriate response to circumstances and balance.
So it seemed pretty clear what the intention was of who these athletes would be. So in the spring of 1999, a friend of 25-year-old Spaniard Carlos RDA contacted him to say that the players on Spain’s on ID basketball team were not disabled at all. And would Rib Gorda be interested in meeting them and seeing what the team was about?
So the friend arranged for him to accompany the team on a trip to Lisbon to play Portugal’s ID team. And Rib Gorda played basketball before giving it up to go to university. So he had always been kind of a club player. So he had kept his hands in basketball, but watching this team on the bus, he figured out pretty quickly that something didn’t seem right.
It seemed to him that the Spanish players were not intellectually disabled at all. So at dinner after the game, the team manager, Eduardo Garcia, told Ribba Gorda that Spain had sent a team, including four players without intellectual disability to the World Cup in 1998 and hadn’t gotten caught. And they planned to send a team with even more fakes to the 1999 European Championships and the Sydney 2000 Paralympics.
Would Carlos be interested in joining the team?
Garcia indicated that no one was really checking on the status of ID players. Rib Gorda said he would think about it
with an official letter inviting him to join the team. Rib Gorda went to see his editor, Carlos SLAs at Capital Magazine. Turns out Carlos is a, journalist, so you’re not just approaching some random 25-year-old guy who likes basketball. He’s also a, a journalist, so he and his editor sit down and say, should he do this?
And they agreed that he should, that he would basically do an inside undercover investigation of this. But it goes a little too far. So over the next two years, Ribba Gorda played with the team, including at the European Championships. He says that manager Garcia told the players to pretend to have difficulties when checking into hotels.
They were ordered to avoid the pre the press. players grew beards and wore hats to avoid being recognized. And even sometimes when they were playing, the coaches would tell them, wait, you gotta back off a little bit because you’re acting too good.
Jill Jaracz: Whoa. but we have an undercover journalist who gets swept all up in this stuff, but nobody knows he’s a journalist,
Alison Brown: correct.
Jill Jaracz: So don’t talk to the press, don’t talk to your teammate.
Alison Brown: Exactly. So through all these tournaments, Spain qualifies for the Paralympics. They head to Sydney. So eight teams competed in the Paralympic basketball ID tournament, and Spain was so much better than the other teams than beat Portugal by 15 points, Poland by 30, Brazil by 56 points, and Japan by 67 points.
Whoa. Other team officials and coaches are watching with growing discomfort and confusion. They understand that something is not right with this Spanish team, but I don’t think they could quite imagine the level. Of malfeasance that was going on here. So Australian coach, Tony Gillet, who was interviewed much later said he had suspicions at the time, but he was afraid to voice them because he couldn’t quite put it into words why he was so uncomfortable.
And he said, quote, we had our concerns that there may have been something going on, but we couldn’t put our finger on it.
Jill Jaracz: Wow. And that’s so frustrating, I would imagine, because a, again, time is passing and this team is racking up wins
Alison Brown: and not just wins. And not even just blowouts, like this is like a professional team playing a high school team in terms of the difference of skill level.
And, and I don’t think people could put their finger on it because they couldn’t imagine that it’s one thing for one individual athlete to cheat. Or to try and, class dope. We’ve talked about that. Or, or saying, oh, that person is, is faking how disabled they are. But for an entire organization to put together this level of malfeasance and lying and fraud, I think was beyond anyone’s imagination.
Jill Jaracz: They obviously weren’t looking at the world of cycling.
Alison Brown: Yeah. I mean, this is before all of that, and it’s the Paralympics and I think especially 25 years ago, there was a purity that we believed mm-hmm. In the Paralympics. You know, we’re just starting to see a lot of doping cases now. So I think people just believed in the goodness of, of other souls and were wrong.
So in the gold medal game, I. Spain was undefeated. They come against Russia. Who had been the pre-tournament favorite Spain wins by 24 points. Wow. But winning the gold medal, sort of like when Millie Vanilli won the uh, Grammy. How that made it unravel, winning the gold medal is what unravels this fraud.
Jill Jaracz: Well, so we need to take a step back ’cause Okay. Us saying Milli Vanilli, we know what we’re talking about. Maybe listeners, if you don’t know, back in the eighties , there was this German pop duo called Millie Vanilli, and they had a song called Girl, you know, it’s True. And they won the Grammy and later came out. They were lip syncing everything. They, they won big time Grammys.
It was a huge scandal that they were lip syncing during every part of their album. And that’s what we’re looking at the level of the here, although I guess there is a girl, you know, it’s true movie that came out in 2023.
Alison Brown: Oh, well, we know what we’re doing after we record, but when you win the gold medal in the Paralympics, or when you win a Grammy, people start looking at you with a lot more scrutiny.
But most importantly, you get your face out there. So the next day after the gold medal, a photo appeared of the team on the cover of Marco, which is one of Spain’s big sports daily newspapers. And the staff at the newspaper started getting all these phone calls saying, I know that guy. He doesn’t have any disabilities.
He’s a police officer, he’s an architect, he’s an engineer. These were professionals who had college educations and advanced degrees and very high level jobs that somebody that you would expect with intellectual disabilities would not be. This is not learning disabilities. This is not somebody with a dyslexia.
This is someone who’s supposed to have an IQ lower than 70 and can’t dress appropriately for the weather. But no, he’s an engineer. So now we’ve got all the rumors swirling press are starting to investigate, and this is where Carlos Reba Gorda drops the hammer in November, 2000, just days after the Paralympics ends.
Capitol Magazine publishes the article where he reveals everything that has happened. Wow, how he was involved, how he was never tested. 10 out of the 12 players on the Spanish team and Rub Gorda says, along with several other Spanish ID athletes who competed at the Paralympics, did not have intellectual disabilities at all.
The article claimed that Spanish coaches and officials were complicit in the deception and that prospective players for the team were never given any psychological or IQ tests. Evaluation included, taking your blood pressure and being asked to do a few pushups.
Jill Jaracz: Wow. Well, and it’s what’s really sad is that they waited until the highest level, so you’ve totally ruined this tournament and made a bad mark.
However, when do you expose such fraud, and if things aren’t being tested, was it just Spain wasn’t testing or was that a problem at the IPC level?
Alison Brown: It was a problem throughout. It seemed like Spain took it advantage of that to a very high level. But we’ve seen in other sports, there was inconsistency in testing across different countries.
In, in many different classifications. So I think now when we talk to, Paralympic athletes and they talk about what they go through for classification, it’s because of stiff stuff like this. Wow. and Rubor took a, a hit for this, obviously as a journalist saying you went too far and he was in fact charged in the fraud case.
Whoa. But we’re gonna get to that in a second. And the IPC did not sit on their hands. A month later in December, Spain is ordered to return the gold medals. They were not reallocated.
Really?
Alison Brown: So now if you look at official records, there is no gold medalist listed.
Jill Jaracz: Oh, wow.
Alison Brown: For basketball ID at Sydney.
Jill Jaracz: Well, yeah.
In a way, because we never would know what the results would’ve been. I. Had they been playing fairly the whole time. So where would they have landed in their pool? Where would they have landed in all of the final events? Would they have even made the final?
Alison Brown: And it threw off everybody else’s point allocation right, as well.
And then of course there are questions. Nothing formal was ever made against any other team, but it sort of put into question the whole ID classification, right? And saying, well, if this team was able to do this, what about everybody else? You know, no other team was ever truly accused, or no evidence was ever found, but it uncovered how unfair and untested all these players were.
Jill Jaracz: Right, and this still kind of lingers today.
Alison Brown: We can’t get to that.
Jill Jaracz: Oh, okay. Well, I will sit back.
Alison Brown: So I mentioned that there was a fraud case brought in Spanish court, but nobody really ever had to pay for this. Of the 19 people charged with crimes in connection to the scandal, including the 10 players, including the journalist only Fernando, Martin Vicente, president of the Spanish Sports Federation for the mentally disabled was convicted of fraud and not until 2013 and he was only sentenced to pay a fine of 5,400 euros is a little more than $7,000.
Vicente maintains his innocence claiming he only agreed to plead guilty in exchange for dismissing the charges against the other defendants and to end the investigation.
Wow.
Alison Brown: Vincent Vicente, who became involved in ID sports after his baby daughter was diagnosed with severe intellectual disabilities called the charges against him, absurd and unfounded.
Wow. So he is the only person to ever plead guilty in Spanish court to this case,
Jill Jaracz: and yet maintains his innocence. So someone here is guilty.
Alison Brown: There are probably a lot of guilty people. Yeah. And, and you can get, you can question, river Go’s involvement as well, because Yes, he was a journalist. Yes, he was doing an undercover investigation, but did he take it too far?
Should he have exposed the Spanish team prior to the Paralympics? My opinion being absolutely.
Jill Jaracz: once you have a championships under your belt, like a Europeans, you’ve proved your point.
Alison Brown: Other athletes with intellectual disabilities did pray the price though, because for the next two Paralympics, the ID category was banned. There was no ID events in oh four and oh eight and Inis, who is now called verus, was working this whole time with the IPC to say, no, we re we we mean it. We’re gonna fix this.
They finally agreed in 2009 to bring back the category for London 2012 only in swimming and athletics and table tennis. It was agreed in 2009 that rowing would be an option, but I don’t think the Rowing Federation actually ever made that happen. So we only still today have. Swimming, athletics and table tennis in the intellectual disability category.
So a system was put into place at the time where you assess a person’s ability to use public transportation, handle money, dress appropriately for the weather. We’ve taken out the IQ test because IQ has been shown not to be as, reliable. athletes have to be evaluated by an independent psychologist, and that report is reviewed by an additional group of psychologists as part of an eligibility committee.
After that eligibility is established, then a second level of classification is done to determine whether the person’s intellectual disability impairs the athlete’s ability to compete. So things like strategic thinking focus, quick thinking on a court. So it actually has become incredibly onerous to qualify for this classification.
Wow. And yet people still question it, and that’s why we haven’t seen this expansion of ID in Paralympics. Plus something that’s come up that came up a lot in what I was reading and we’ve talked about with some people in the Paralympic movement does, ID belong in the Paralympics and there is a lot of conflict about whether athletes with intellectual disabilities belong in the Paralympics.
And as we said earlier, special Olympics and Paralympics are very different. And do we want to add to the confusion that there already already is in the public view of the two? So there’s that question in the Paralympic movement. Do we even want this category?
Jill Jaracz: It’s so interesting. And just so tough to deal with.
Alison Brown: So in London 2012, when it came back, 120 athletes competed in that intellectually, disabled category. And Paris 2024, that number had only grown to about 160. Wow. So it’s not something that is being encouraged in the Paralympic movement. Uh, what was really funny to me in this, in that the precise number for that ID category, depending on where you read for Paris, will be 1 57 to 1 64.
And I think that adds to this category is just not respected and looked at and analyzed in the Paralympic movement as a whole. And I think it goes back to the Spanish basketball team. Wow.
Jill Jaracz: Oh man, it, I mean, it’s an interesting situation, not one that anybody wants to deal with. I would think like you it’s so demoralizing to find out that a team has cheated in such an underhanded way.
you know, like you won a gold medal that badly. That you wanna say, just pretend having an intellectual disability. it’s confounding on so many, so many ways.
Sydney 2000: Road Cycling – Comebacks and cheats
Jill Jaracz: Also confounding it’s surf sport of cycling. Now, this is not all bad. I will say this. This is not, not everything in cycling is, Gonna make you cry, but, because it’s live right now and the Tour de France on is on. So that is why it’s a good time to talk about road cycling at Sydney 2000. Not that I want to, because knowing what we know now, some of this is painful, but not all of it. So just put on your bike helmet, everyone.
Let’s hope we don’t crash. So, road cycling happened near the end of Sydney, 2000. So I, I wanna talk about the four road events in chronological order instead of splitting it up. Men’s and women’s First, we had the women’s road race on September 26th, then the men’s road race, which was the next day. Then we had the Women’s and Men’s Road Time trial that both took place on the same day, which was September 30th.
And that’s the penultimate day of the game. So we are about done with Sydney here. All four races took place on roughly the same course. So for the road race, it’s a 17.1 kilometer loop, and it starts at Moore Park by the Sydney Cricket Grounds. And this is about six and a half kilometers south of the Opera House.
If you wanna orient that. It starts by the Sydney Cricket Grounds, goes east through the Centennial Parklands, and then to the coast at Bronte Beach and loops back around. So this is a corset is pretty flat. There’s a little bit of climbing, but it’s mostly technical with a lot of turns. And that required, uh, the cyclist to slow down to get them right.
it does have power climbs including one that’s about a kilometer long. And then there’s our desense where cyclists could be going up to 90 kilometers an hour. It’s an interesting course. I would say that also meant that on the flip side, there’s not a whole lot of opportunity to break away. There’s also not a lot of places where you can recover if you’re tired.
Sydney 2000 Olympics: Women’s Cycling Road Race
So for the Women’s Road race, we are on the fifth time that women have been cycling in the Olympics. They started in LA 84. In terms of equality, we’re still nowhere near the men. The course is much shorter.
There are fewer cyclists. So the women are racing eight laps of this 17 kilometer course. So they have a total of 119.7 kilometers. That is almost half of what the men are cycling, and there are 57 women in the road race compared to 154 men. It’s, it’s tough. So let’s look at some of the big names in the field.
We’ve got, defending gold medalist Janine Longo Elli of France, who is cycling at her Fifth Olympics at the age of 41. And remember this nice. This is the fifth iteration of the games.
Longo is a massively successful cyclist, but the Olympics have not always been good to her. In 84, she was in the lead group and was involved in the collision in the last few hundred meters at left turn fifth in sixth place. And it’s interesting ’cause you can watch this in Eric Heen is doing commentary on this race and there are six racers and they cut to a different angle and all of a sudden there are five and you hear ’em go, where’s Longo?
And nobody. That’s it. That’s it. then at Soul, 88 a month ahead of time, she broke her hip, still raced at the games, but she finished ow,
finished 21st in that race. And then, she finally reached the podium at Barcelona in 1992, but it was silver and that was not enough for her. Longo was one of the best cyclists in the world, but she was not liked very much on the, the tour because she was extremely competitive. And she also had an inclination to do her own thing.
And that meant even if she, like, training wise or, sharing knowledge or being a team even on the course, like she was gonna do her own thing. that’s what she did in Atlanta, 1996. She did not join the team for acclimatization training in Atlanta, uh, because everyone was getting used to the humidity.
she went to Colorado for altitude training instead that paid off. She took the gold in Atlanta and followed up with a silver in the time trial. So she is back in Sydney to defend her medals, but the course is not suited to her style and she could be in trouble here. Sydney 2000, is also the comeback for Dutch writer, uh, Leon Zalar Van Morsel, who is from the Netherlands.
She is a prior Olympian. She was in, 1992 and is back for 2000 A little bit about her, she stands out from the other writers on the cycle, on the circuit two. But that’s because she does not look very sporty. She does not have short hair. Like other girls, she wears makeup on her bike. She likes to look good.
And, being a girly girl was not something that the other cyclists really got into and, she wasn’t really accepted in the racing community, but she started cycling in the eighties. And so by the late eighties, early nineties, she is making her a name for herself on the bike. And there are some differing accounts of what happens next.
One account said she wanted to be as fit and skinny as Jeannie Longo. so she put herself on a strict diet.
Alison Brown: so that she wasn’t eating too many van morsels.
Jill Jaracz: Oh my gosh.
Alison Brown: I’ve been sitting here for a minute. Oh my God. Trying to come up with how I could get that in. Oh my
Jill Jaracz: gosh. And you just added its exactly, another account said that a Dutch cycling official told her that she would be a better hill climber if she lost a little weight. So she did lose a little weight and she won the 1992 Tour de France Femes.
She also went to Barcelona and competed in the road, race and track individual pursuit. But there, her highest placement was eighth. she won the 1993 Tour de France, and by now she is training six hours a day on no food. And by 1994, she has gone from 145 pounds to 95 pounds and her body is done.
Alison Brown: She needs a lot of V morsels.
Jill Jaracz: She needed a lot of, she had a long struggle with Anor anorexia. Oh, that, yes. Oh. Uh, she did manage to get herself healthy though. And in 96 started riding for fun and two years later decided to start competing. Won two consecutive world time trials. And here we are. It’s Sydney 2000, and she wants gold.
Alison Brown: I’m already cheering for her.
Anyone who comes back from eating an eating disorder in sports, ’cause you know, they have so much pressure. We’ve talked about this a million times. Mm-hmm. I’m like, okay, you win.
Jill Jaracz: Right. And. Eating disorders are tough to begin with. Yes. So to add that other layer of competitiveness and where you’re constantly being compared to other people, it’s just another level.
It’s, it’s amazing. So she is back, she started her Sydney 2000 experience on the track. She raced in the pursuit and the points race there in the pursuit. She broke a world record in the semis, took gold in the final, in the points race. She was sitting in fifth and moved up to silver in the final sprint.
So she is already having a good games. So we have, Longo and Van Morsel as the ones to watch on the road. Also in the mix here is Australian Anna Wilson, who is ranked second in the world at this point. And for the last four years, she has been dreaming of winning the Olympics at home.
Alison Brown: Yeah. Home, home field advantage.
You love that.
Jill Jaracz: Exactly. Exactly. So from the start of this race, everyone. Goes hard because it is a one day race. it’s about 15 degrees Celsius, so it’s pretty cool, not what they expected. Slight tailwind. But by the third lap, the race conditions just got horrible. It started to pour rain. There were lots of crashes and the rain may have kept the field close or the riders didn’t go out hard enough because so many people were at the front for the last half of the race.
And by the end, the group in the final sprint was 24 rider. Yeah, usually you have a handful, but, but now we’re 24 strong. Anybody’s race who comes out on top with the health of her teammates. Van Morsel had the strongest sprint when it counted. She had everyone at the finish for gold. and I believe the money she got from the Netherlands, she decided to split it with her teammates.
Oh,
Alison Brown: see, I knew I liked her.
Jill Jaracz: There was a photo finish for silver and bronze with hunka coup feral of Germany edging out, Deanna Ute of Lithuania for the bronze.
Anna Wilson finished fourth. Surprised that the Peloton did not go out a little harder because so many of the rider were strong at the end. And Longo Sapr was in the second group of sprinters finishing six seconds behind and a disappointing 26th. And she blamed the cold weather for sapping her strength.
So we have gold goes to Leone, ARD van morsel from Netherlands, silver to Han Hunka, Kupfer Nale from Germany and bronze to Deanna Jte,
Sydney 2000 Olympics: Men’s Cycling Road Race
in the men’s road race. Next day. We are in an interesting time for men’s cycling. Sporting intelligence later called it the EPO era due to all of the doping that happened in the sport.
So what’s going on at the Olympics? Let’s look at the names again. A 1996 road race gold medalist Pascal Richard from Switzerland did not make the Swiss team this year. So we will have a new gold medalist American Lance Armstrong. He is in his second Olympics and getting me into Lance’s. Big story in 1996, he started year, the year as the world number one huge deal in American cycling.
He did not do well at Atlanta. 1996, he was sixth in the time trial 12th in the road race and that fall he was diagnosed with stage three testicular cancer after surgery and chemo. He went back to training in 1997, he also started the live strong foundation, which if you. Wonder where our rubber bracelets that promote any kind of cause came from.
That is where they started. Everybody had yellow bracelets. I had a yellow bracelet. Do you did
Alison Brown: I had a yellow bracelet.
Jill Jaracz: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so you could get yellow bracelets for the list. Strong foundation. cycling wise, he has signed up with Team US Postal Service and did not do that well that year. 1998, he’s getting a couple major top five finishes and in 1999 he won the first of seven consecutive Tour de France titles.
His main rival during this time is German Jan Ulrich, who races for Team Deutsche Telecom. Ulrich took second in the 1996 Tour de France and he won it in 97. When Lance is still recovering, Ulrich is a sprint specialist. He’s controversial on the field because he does not train as much as everyone else.
He is also, uh. Really excited about off season and celebrates the off season very well. Has a reputation for gaining weight and not really training. So 2000, he comes back from the off season, does not do well for the beginning of the season. he finished his second to, Lance Armstrong a lot in the Tour de France, but he is ready for his first Olympics.
This is the second Olympics that pro cyclists are allowed at the games. You will see this pro team influence play out here at Sydney, although you won’t see it on their bikes because they have to cover up the team names with stickers. The men had better weather than the women, so there was some aggressive riding early on.
And because cycling is a team sport with individual results, you’ve got countrymen helping each other. And with this pro element, you have pro teammates helping each other out no matter what country they’re from.
Alison Brown: Right. Because most of the pro teams are multicultural, you know, they’re multi countries. Yes.
You don’t generally have, you know, on that, DEU and telecom, you will have an American, you will have a Frenchman, you will have a couple Germans. Same thing with, with the US Post Office. It was not a purely American team. So you have this, we haven’t gotten to talk to anybody about that, if that still plays an influence.
Jill Jaracz: That’s a good question. It’s a, it’s a good question. Yeah. We’ll, we’ll go
Alison Brown: back to that when we, when we talk to some more cyclists.
Jill Jaracz: So with three and a half laps to go, Ulrich made his way up to the lead group and on the penultimate climb, he and his Deutsche Telecom teammates, Andreas Kloden from Germany and Alexander of OV from Kazakhstan, they take off and they leave everyone else behind.
And with about three kilometers left, the three of them have a little conversation and decided the finishing order. Jan Ulrich sped off the other two, decided not to chase. Ulrich won gold. OVF, who’s a good sprinter, took the silver and Clain finished a few seconds later behind with the bronze, while the two countries split medals team Deutsche Telecom, sweat the podium.
Alison Brown: I was just gonna ask, I wonder how that was received at the time in the Olympic movement.
Jill Jaracz: It’s a good question and I, I couldn’t get into that element. Right. I should because I, I, I, well, and, and how things play out. You gotta wonder what they really think.
Pro cycl, I mean, they still let pros in, so they didn’t close that door. But you have to wonder if, if associations, association’s got a talking to about country, it’s, it’d be interesting to look at the Olympic history and see how that develops a little bit more. I mean, I, I will say this, I don’t pay attention to men’s cycling very much anymore.
after Lance Armstrong, after Floyd, Floyd Landis was really put the nail in the coffin for me when he was caught doping or admitted to doping during the Tour de France, after his major, major comeback. That was it. I was done watching pro cycling and it’s. I might look at Tour de France’s results just because it’s a thing, but I don’t pay attention the way I used to.
And that’s agreed. it’s gonna be a lot for me to come back. And we don’t get cyclists really at the media summit either,
Alison Brown: right? Because they’re on a pro tour. Right. We’ve spoken, I think we, I don’t think we’ve ever spoken to a man. Oh,
Jill Jaracz: no, no, no,
Alison Brown: no. All only women.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. So we’ll have to work on getting ourselves geared up for that, and maybe we can figure that out on the list.
cycling news had a great moment from this race, though. So around Bronte Road, near the beach, a big group of residents joined together to watch a spectacle, but they didn’t know anybody who was racing. They weren’t into cycling. They were just like, it’s outside our door. Let’s watch. So they decided to pick one name off the start list and cheer for that cyclist.
And that lucky rider was Jazzy Fernandez Garcia from Guam Guam’s, only rider. So the group made a giant sign for him out of a bedsheet, and they cheered for him every time he went by, including Jazz. Jesse, jazzy, oy, oy, oy. Poor Garcia falls behind pretty quickly and he’s gonna be lapped. And once you’re lapped you are out of the race.
once he realizes that the the inevitable is going to happen, he waved to his fans when he rode by and on the next lap, he rolled along to thank them and take pictures with the sign. And to me, that one redeeming thing off the men’s road race, this is the best kind of Olympic moment. And listeners, if you are going to a games and you go to a road race or a marathon.
Make a sign for one of the people from a very small country that is not going to do well, and you will have fun making their day. once again, the podium here, Jan Ulrich from Germany wins gold. Alexander CRO from Kazakhstan is silver and bronze goes to Andreas Kloden from Germany. All three from Team Deutsche Telecom.
Sydney 2000 Olympics: The Time Trial
So the time trial course is shorter than the road race, but it’s along the same route. Basically, it cut out the beach section, which cut out the main climb of the race, and it did a more windy route in Centennial Park, which put in more turns and technicality. So now we are making it more of a power course versus more of a rhythm course.
So if you’re somebody who just flat out sprints, you are stuck doing like 30 turns per lap, and that means you’re turning and accelerating or turning and climbing or turning and descending, and that’s a lot more technical. for a time trial, it wasn’t very flat. There is a two kilometer stretch that looks flat, but it’s an uphill.
So that was also tough on the racers and British cyclist. Chris Boardman, who was a former time trial world champ, did not love the course so much that he was quoted by Reuters saying The Olympic time trial needs more than this. It’s not ideal and I hate it with a passion. There are a lot of lumps and a lot of turns, which will suit the road Racers in the time trial, well, women did two laps of the course with the best rider starting last.
Men do three laps of this course, and even though they set out at 92nd intervals, the fact that they had to do multiple labs means that there could be some traffic, particularly for the men. The, once you get in all these waves coming out.
Sydney 2000 Olympics: Women’s Cycling Time Trial
for the women, it’s only their second time trial. Atlanta, 1996 was the first time they got to do a time trial in the Olympics. uh, in the mix we have defending Champ Russian, Sofia Za Bureau Ova, who is still in good form, but we also still have Leon Zalar Van Morsel, who has already bagged hardware, having a great Olympics. But could she be tired at this point?
Last, last race, but no, this isn’t, she’s not, let’s just stop that right there. She isn’t fine form. She finishes 37 seconds ahead of Silver Place, gets her fourth medal of the games.
So the silver medalist in the time trial is a surprise. Uh, coming outta nowhere American Mary Holden. She got revenge on a lousy road race that she did not finish.
She had a flat tire, she got a crash, she had to change her bike. She got another flat tire and she was done. That was, that was poor Holden’s race. But she’s a time trial specialist. She also has criterium skills and that helped her maneuver really well through all of these turns. And while most people were surprised by this result, she wasn’t.
And she told cycling news quote, I had been visualizing this race the whole year. I kept thinking if I have a great day, I could get a medal. I think that maybe I was the only one who believed that besides my boyfriend. It worked out today. I can’t believe it.
Alison Brown: Proud Mary. Keep on turning.
Jill Jaracz: I know. And then a French legend, Jeannie Longo Sopr, made up for her road race and came from behind to take the bronze away from.
Australian Anna Wilson. Oh, she got two-fourths. Two-fourths at a home games. Such a bummer for Wilson. the bronze gives Longo a full set of Olympic medals.
Alison Brown: Oh, perfect.
Jill Jaracz: To which she said, quote, it will look nice on my dining room table.
Alison Brown: Dining table. It does. I, you know what, I am totally about the full set.
I love when people have a full set and then can display it. It’s beautiful.
Jill Jaracz: And what about our defending champion, Russians z Rova? She finished 12th. So gold goes to Leonine Dillard von Morsel, silver to Mary Holden from the USA and Bronze, Toni Longo Elli.
Sydney 2000 Olympics: Men’s Cycling Time Trial
So over to the Men Last Race of the Games, this is John Ulrich’s specialty.
So after the gold in the road race, he, has high expectations. He is very, very pumped. Lance Armstrong is also expected to give Ulrich a run for his money. These two and Lance Armstrong is very pumped
Alison Brown: in a different way.
Jill Jaracz: And so these two are starting last. They are 37th and 38th, so they would know the times they’d have to beat along the way.
And the time to beat was set by 34-year-old Russian Vila Mov. mov was inspired to take up cycling from watching Moscow 1980, and he had been part of the SR’S Olympic team at Seoul, 1988, winning gold in the cycling team pursuit. So then the government allowed him to turn professional in 89, so he joined the tour, made his name as a sprinter in 2000.
He is on Team US Postal Service to ride as one of Lance Armstrong’s lieutenants. that year’s tour was really tough on EC Mov, and he decided not to take time off between that and the Olympics. He instead went to altitude to train and trained in isolation. And initially that strategy looked like it was not going to pay off because in the road race he finished 74th, but his time trial was magical.
He rode in the second wave of riders, and fortunately for him, he didn’t have a very strong wind, so he could manage that. And any tailwind benefits that anybody got were negated by a lot of trees on the course. So you couldn’t hope that the tailwind would help you. The time OV had to beat was 58, 52, his time, 57 40.
He’s over a mile a minute faster. So Ulrich has his shot. He’s se six seconds ahead at the second to last time check. But that final stretch s sapped him and he lost 14 seconds. So he finished eight seconds behind Lance Armstrong feeling good going hard. Not his day. So ec, oops.
Seized Omo wins a surprise. Gold Ulrich took the silver eight seconds behind. Lance Armstrong won the bronze. So ECMO wins gold again, 12 years after his first gold medal. silver goes to Yan Ulrich and bronze goes to Lance Armstrong. But we are not done with this particular podium yet because what about drugs?
Road cycling and doping in this era
So we know now that this time period is part of the EPO era, the EPO era. Uh, EPO is a hormone that helps the body produce more red blood cells, so mu muscles get more oxygen and athletes go faster. And at the beginning of August, 2000, so we’re talking a couple months before the games, the IOC Medical Commission, again, vice chaired by Jacque Rogue, approved urine and blood tests to detect EPO.
And both the urine and blood tests had to be positive for an athlete to be found guilty of doping. But because they were expensive, they did them one at a time. first, athletes would do the blood test, which according to cycling news cost six to $800 Australian dollars per test. And if that was positive, they would do the 2000 Australian dollar urine test.
And if that would positive, the athlete would be sanctioned. However. EPO is a drug that works over a long period of time and the blood test would, be able to detect EPO three weeks after an injection. The urine test only works for the previous 72 hours, so basically the test isn’t gonna be effective if it’s taken it competition time because, people will take EPO and be off of it for a long time and they’ll still feel the effects of the drug.
on top of that, the doping control procedure was that specific countries would be tested out of competition, but not everyone. And of course, the Dutch noted that if you you’re not on the testing list. That leaves the door wide open for you to do anything. Surprisingly, during the games, no, no.
Cyclists were found to have doped that I could find and. Pre-competition testing, four cyclists were disqualified for the games so they could not come to the games ’cause they
Alison Brown: tested positive. I’m actually surprised anybody at this time was getting caught for anything.
Jill Jaracz: Oh yeah, that’s
Alison Brown: very
Jill Jaracz: true.
Alison Brown: Because just the way, what we know now and the sophistication of so many different systems.
So I, I don’t know if you have this, but I would think that the four athletes that thought got caught were either very small programs or didn’t, or weren’t professionals.
Jill Jaracz: I do not have it, but they were smaller. Okay. They were not big names to my recollection.
Alison Brown: Yeah.
Jill Jaracz: so the Sydney Morning Herald reported that, 2,758 athletes, including all the gold medalists from Sydney during, did blood and urine tests during the games.
310 were randomly chosen for EPO testing. Those all came back negative. But to be clean during the games, athletes would have had to been off EPO for at least 10 days ahead of time. Off testing through the blood test found seven positives. So one of the science scientists who developed, one of the scientists who developed the blood test estimated that based on this sample, 60 or more of those initial 27 58 athletes would have tested positive for using a PO ahead of the games.
The IOC did not do anything with this information because of the legal RAM ramifications of an off test, and those athletes who tested positive in this sampling will probably never be identified. I. you know, they got anonymized, so we’re never, we’re never gonna know this. That said, we still have issues with doping and cycling.
Doping rumors had swirled around Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Service team for years, and in August, 2012, the US Anti-Doping Agency released the results of a major investigation against Lance Armstrong, which banned him for life and disqualified all of his results from August 1st, 1998, onwards as a result of the US Postal Service cycling team, dopey conspiracy, there is a lot about that.
future Olympians will have problems as well. Armstrong did not appeal this and said he did not dope. a couple months later in October, the IOC says they will wait for the International Cycling Union to determine what they’re gonna do in response. And then even though Armstrong does not dope, according to him in January, 2013, he goes on Oprah and admits that he doped extensively.
And how big of a situation this is is just incredible.
Alison Brown: because not only did he dope, let’s, let’s just take a second
Jill Jaracz: Yes. To say
Alison Brown: what a horrible, horrible, horrible human being Lance Armstrong is.
Jill Jaracz: Well, yeah. I mean, so, so competitive and just bully. And it just sounded like a horrible time,
Alison Brown: you know, ruined other people’s careers.
attacked other people publicly who accused him of what he was doing. Yes. So we have absolutely zero Love for Lance Armstrong. No, no. Yeah. And how heartbreaking this was with that Live strong and, and how he had supported kids with cancer and ugh.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. It was just a horrible time. And I just remember you, you were so in awe of him.
Uh, just you as a person. And I read his books. I, I just, you felt so much for him and what he was doing for cancer and how he beat it and what an inspiration he was. And for all of it to come crashing down and, and just be at the same time. So duplicitous it, it just, you lost so much trust in the sport.
- And I, I don’t know if the sport really has ever gotten that back. so after Armstrong goes on, Oprah, the IOC stripped him of his bronze and they vacated the bronze and the official results, they demanded, he returned the medal, which Armstrong did in September, 2013, so much later in the year. I did ask why the IOC, why the medal was not real allocated.
’cause my hunch is that he did not test positive during the game, so they didn’t wanna do a reallocation, and they didn’t consider it to be like a standing doping, standard doping situation. But I did not get any response from the IOC keeping on with the doping. In 2017, a Dutch doctor said he purchased and gave EPO to Leon Teen Zalar Van Morsel.
Ahead of Sydney. She denies it. She said she went to that doctor for diet and training advice, considering that she had had anorexia and wanted to make sure she was okay. This has turned into a, he said, she said there’s no proof of anything, so we, hopefully that is all. Okay. Jeanine Longo was a pretty polarizing figure during this whole time.
she had some issues with doping in her career. She tested positive for ephedrine in 1987, served some time off, and in 2011 her husband was accused of buying EPO and, OV was a part of the US Postal Service team. He has not admitted to doping. Teddy ler writing for sporting intelligence put OV in its cycle of suspicion, saying that he was a converted doper who never got punished.
The cycling. try to put a link to this in the show notes. ’cause sporting intelligence has this giant photo illustration of all of the teams and everyone on them, and how many people were doping. And it was something like at least 65% or, or more. And then that sounds even low to me now, but so many people were doping.
So many people were confirmed, suspect, uh, you know, suspected but not confirmed. Very, very rare to find a clean rider during this time.
What happened to the road cycling stars after Sydney 2000?
So where are they now? van Morsel continued racing after Sydney at Athens 2004. She wanted to defend her three gold medals in the the track individual pursuit. She took bronze with a.
In the road race with two labs to go. She fell and sustained a concussion. But, uh, three days later, she won the time trial by 24 seconds. She retired soon thereafter with four golds. One silver and one bronze. was the most successful female cyclist in Olympic history until track specialist Dame Laura Kenney won her fifth gold at Tokyo 2020.
Uh, leonine had a daughter in 2 0 0 7. In 2 0 0 8, she established her own foundation to support eating disorder related charities. And then in 2015, the foundation opened its own drop in center that’s called Leon heis, which, uh, helps people with eating disorders and their loved ones. So she’s doing good in the community.
at Sydney, Jeannie Longo Sapr was asked if that was her last Olympics. It was certainly thought to be because she was 41 at the time. And at the time, cycling news quoted her as saying the Olympic Games in 2004 is in Athens, and I don’t like the pollution,
but four years later you find her in Athens. And then four years after that, she was in even a more polluted city called Beijing 2008. And at both of those games, she was off the podium, although she was fourth in the time trial at Beijing fourth, and and this is 2008, she has been cycling in every Olympics that the women, she’s almost 50.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah.
At that point.
Jill Jaracz: Uh, she was still competing in the French National Championships as late as 2016. And now apparently she still does age group racing and she is in her sixties. I mean, this is a woman who does not know how to quit. Jan Ulrich never beat Lance Armstrong at the Tour de France. He continued racing for several more years.
He he competed at Athens. 2004. Was 18th in the road race. Sixth in the time trial. In 2006, he got banned from the Tour de France for doping suspicions. He retired in 2007. Since then, he’s had issues with drugs and alcohol almost died in 2018 because of this. In 2023 on an Amazon Prime documentary, he admitted to doping, saying he started in 1996.
So do we open up this can of worms again? IOCI don’t know.
Alison Brown: I think this goes back to when they talk about the East German swimmers from the seventies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. It’s
Alison Brown: kind of like we could wipe out these entire podiums.
Mm-hmm.
Alison Brown: But the people. I see them vacating medals rather than reallocating because how far down the list do you have to go?
Right to find someone who was actually clean?
Jill Jaracz: Omo, he competed at Athens 2004, two, and he’s still old. He, along with 69 other writers did not finish in the ridiculously hot road race at Athens. He played second to American Tyler Hamilton in the time trial in 2012 when Hamilton admitted he doped during Athens.
Ccam got upgraded to gold, but we still have is, you know, doping suspicions swirl him because he was on US Postal Service. It’s all very complicated and Tyler Hamilton wrote a book about it and Omo said Tyler Hamilton just wanted the money from the book. we’re just never gonna know everything.
I think.
Alison Brown: it’s kind of like lies, lies and cycling.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, mov got the gold in Athens 2004. His last year on the pro tour was 2006. Uh, he estimates that in his 26 year pro career, including training and competition, he rode almost a million kilometers on his bike. So he is currently president of the Russian Cycling Federation now,
and that is cycling at Sydney 2000. So many swirls, so many great stories. So many suspicions. Yeah. But hopefully we can remember the good
dunno.
Alison Brown: Yeah. Uh, source list for you. Well, there is a fantastic ESPN 30 for 30 on the story. so I also have that. And Yahoo Sports, several BBC articles, daily Mail, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, NBC Sports, New York Times Paralympics website, RTE, world Para Athletics Athletes Without Limits Time Magazine, the smart set, and a fantastic, academic article by Professor Jan Byrds called, is There Space on the Podium for us All?
Jill Jaracz: Ooh, uh, for me, I have, ESPN, the official report from the Sydney 2000 Olympics, uh, cycling news. Several articles from them. service curves be Associated Press. Skoda, we love cycling The Guardian several articles there. history.com, Leon heis, NPR edia olympics.com. Lamond People Pro Cycling Stats, Russian Cycling Federation, Sydney Morning Herald, dare Spiegel, and Sporting Intelligence. The Move Podcast, time Magazine, usada, the complete book of the Olympics, 2008 edition by David Wachinski and Jamie Loki. And, uh, another ESPN article. So yes, this was a big one,
Alison Brown: you know, for all the cheating and horrible scandals from 2000.
’cause now we’ve, we’ve talked about Marian Jones, we’ve talked about these two. And gymnastics,
Jill Jaracz: I mean like, and
Alison Brown: gymnastics and, and yet we always come back to Sydney was amazing. I
Jill Jaracz: know. Which
Alison Brown: tells you just how amazing everything was for us to forget all of these other things that happened. So Australians, man, did you do an amazing job because none of this was your fault.
Jill Jaracz: No. No. And you just got stuck with the aftermath. next month we’ve gotta get some more amazing stories. We have to find something more
Alison Brown: and we promise never to dope or cheat in podcasting.
Coming Soon!
Jill Jaracz: Exactly. So that will do it for this episode. let us know what you remember from Sydney 2000 and do you remember this horrible stuff?
Alison Brown: And we do love hearing from you. You can chat with us and other listeners on our Facebook group. Keep The Flame Alive Podcast. Email us at Flame Alive pod@gmail.com. The voicemail and text line is always open at 2 0 8 3 5 2 6 3 4 8. That’s 2 0 8. Flame it and if you need more Olympics and Paralympics in your life.
And who doesn’t sign up for our weekly newsletter@flamealivepod.com. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.
Jill Jaracz: Next week is episode 400, so you know what that means?
Virtual.
Jill Jaracz: That’s right.
You made a this.
Alison Brown: Shush that I do say all the time, don’t I?
Jill Jaracz: And so next week it will be our virtual party and we will talk about some of our favorite memories from the show. Here are your thoughts on the Olympics and Paralympics. We really hope you can join us.
If you can make it to the taping, that’s tiny url.com/ 400 party. That’s the number 400 party. If not, please tune in and celebrate while you listen and we can celebrate this beautiful community that you all have helped us build together. And, uh, thank you so much for listening. Until next time, keep the flame alive.