Travis Tygart: The Code of Silence & the Biggest Doping Scandal in US History

For the Paris Olympics - a re-release of an extraordinary interview with the top anti-doping investigator in the world - Travis Tygart.

A tough, lean Texan who took on Lance Armstrong and despite FBI warnings, death threats,  pressure from Hollywood stars and Washington politicians - exposed the truth behind the biggest doping scandal in US history.

At this year's Olympics, Tygart is still fighting the good fight for clean athletes everywhere.

The show: Learn more at www.crimewaves.com, you can follow the team on twitter at @declan_hill 

Please subscribe, rate, review or like this episode of CrimeWaves at YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.  
For more information on CrimeWaves please see - 
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www.declanhill.com
Twitter: declan_hill

Transcript

 Lance Armstrong & The Code of SIlence


It's three o'clock in the morning.
You have a family, a sleeping wife, young children, and security guards.
They are watching everyone who comes down the street.
And the police have not put these guards there, nor have any officials.
You have had to pay for them.
You've had to do this because you are investigating the biggest doping scandal in the history of American sport.
It's a case that involves Hollywood superstars, international sporting icons, congressional leaders, tens of millions of dollars in taxpayers money and sponsorship deals, and clear, credible death threats.
Welcome to Crimewaves.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world.
Welcome to Crimewaves.
I'm Declan Hill, and we are midway through our first mini-season.
It's called Blood Sports, and it's about the great scandals, controversies, and investigations in modern-day sport.
Last week, we looked at the criminal empire at the top of international track and field.
The week before, we took a look at Russia's state-sponsored doping with an exclusive interview with Vitaly Stepnov, the whistleblower who's still in hiding after six years.
But this week, myself and the producers, Eric Krebs and Bruce Barber, are taking a look at the American equivalent of those international scandals.
Lance Armstrong was like an ancient Greek mythical figure for our times.
He was a cancer survivor who'd come back from a hospital bed to win the Tour de France seven times.
He dated rock stars.
He was on top of the world
He was also a systematic bullying cheat.
The man who investigated Armstrong is the head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, Travis Taggart.
After his investigation into the corruption in Armstrong's team, he and the agency issued this statement.
The doping conspiracy was professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy, and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage through superior doping practices.
A program organized by individuals who thought that they were above the rules and who still play a major and active role in sport today.
The evidence demonstrates that the Code of Silence, a performance-enhancing drug use in the sport of cycling, has been shattered.
However, breaking that code of silence was not easy.
And as you'll hear, Taggart, in his investigation, faced monumental pressure from politicians, Hollywood stars, and threats to his and his family's safety.
He joined the Crimewaves team on the week of the 20th anniversary of his organization, the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
Good morning, Travis.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Hey, great to be here, Declan.
Thanks a lot for having me.
Okay, I'm just going to get cracking right away.
It's 2012, it's the middle of a night, you know, whatever night, it's two in the morning, and here's the situation that Travis Taggart and the whole USADA team is facing.
Congress, you know, important guys in Congress, the same guys who a few months ago were shaking hands with you and smiling and hey, you know, trying to get selfies with you.
They're really against you.
They're like, hey, let's get a petition together to existentially close this agency down.
You've got influential media.
You've got key people at the Washington Post saying basically, you know, what a jerk you are.
You've got Matthew McConaughey, another lean, heroic kind of Texan type guy.
And then the death threats come.
All because you're taking on one of the most powerful, iconic men in the world at that time.
Because of the cheating, because of the lies that is going around.
What do you do at that moment at two o'clock in the morning when all that is coming into you?
Well, unfortunately I'm able to compartmentalize it.
I never really thought about it all at once.
I may have shut the office down if I felt like it was, you know, as just characterized.
But no, listen, in all seriousness, I mean,
Look, I think we made a decision, and it really goes back to when we were started, that we're gonna do our job.
And if people don't like us doing our job, and we certainly found ourselves in other cases prior to the Lance Armstrong case that you just described,
Declan Hill
amongst our staff but at our board meeting said look if we're unwilling to go forward on this case we should shut down and if people whether it's Congress or the U.S.
Olympic Committee or the public or anyone doesn't like us doing our job then let's go all find new jobs because it's not worth us going through the charade to pretend and to become essentially hypocrites
Declan Hill
more easy decisions we've ever had to make.
Now, I mean, it was, you know, peaceful, or our security wasn't threatened, or, you know, our, our reputation.
You were, you were receiving death threats at that time.
I mean, in the height of all this stuff, you were, I mean, you were getting serious incoming flak.
Yeah.
And again, I think, you know, partly you commit to the principle of what's right and wrong,
and hopefully people in you know the position I hold but also our board members obviously we have an amazing team of people who are just committed to doing the right thing even if it's tough to do and look yeah for sure it's tough I mean as I was cleaning out my office since my daughter now has just gone off to
Start her freshman year in college, I ran across some of the private security that we had to have 24 hours at our house here.
And, you know, just kind of looking, and it was literally eight years ago, August of 2012, and kind of reading through those and, you know, looking at the officer writing down the report of, you know, a car coming at three in the morning and stopped for 15 minutes in front of the house.
You know, when he walks back there, they peel off, but then they come back an hour and a half later.
And, you know, you look at some of those episodes and you're like, yeah, maybe, maybe I was too stupid to know what was really going on.
But, but again, even if I think I was fully aware, you just commit to that principle and be willing to endure it and find comfort in the discomfort, knowing that the commitment you made is the right decision and you're doing it for the right reasons.
We're talking though, I mean, you've got a family, you know,
Declan
Don't hold accountable one of the most iconic sporting figures in the world.
Let him go.
Give him a free pass because he's won the Tour de France seven times.
Yeah, but again, I mean, listen, I think, you know, referees are in a much more difficult position sometimes than we found ourselves in this case because it was so clear.
Like, no one, I mean, I remember the press release we issued in October of 2012 after we issued our reasoned decision.
He, if you remember, thrown in the towel, accepted the lifetime ban, and just said it was wrong, and we were out to get him, et cetera, et cetera.
The press release came to me, and in it,
they had the legal burden that the code the rules require and it said something you know the evidence proved to the comfortable satisfaction that this had occurred I scratched through it sent it back it then came back you know the criminal standard the evidence proved beyond a reasonable doubt I scratched through it sent it back came back to me and you look at the press release today and it says there is no doubt and there wasn't any doubt in the evidence where you know referees there are sometimes judgment calls
There was no judgment call to be had here.
Like, you either were going to intentionally cover up the most potent, performance-enhancing, you know, fraudulent case that we've ever seen, or you were going to do your job.
And resting on that truth, I think, gives us and gave us the resolve, in addition to our, you know, commitment and our organization's allegiance, you know, oath to do the right thing, even if tough, to move forward without second guessing it.
Travis, let's unpack that because I work with students, you know, 17, 18, 19 years old, many of whom, Lance Armstrong, I kind of, you know, my dad talks about him.
So let's, if you don't mind, and I don't mean that in a patronizing way, it's just, it's been eight years since the Oprah Winfrey from the movies coming out from all that stuff.
Let's unpack that.
Lance Armstrong was the top cyclist in the world at that time.
He had won the Tour de France seven times.
He comes back, he mounts a comeback.
What was the evidence against him that was showing what was going on?
Yeah, well, there was various buckets of evidence.
To me, as a lawyer, a non-scientific expert, the most powerful was the firsthand testimony of 11 of his teammates.
11?
Yeah, that all participated
In the the doping that were part of the conspiracy talk to the coach many saw him you know when George Hincapie for example I think his may have been in a way the most powerful because he was still best friends with Lance and even in his affidavit a sworn affidavit that you
Declan Hill is the author of The Code of Silence.
The Code of Silence is a series of interviews that show payments in cash to a coach and a doctor that he had claimed who were notorious for providing advice and showing athletes how to dope who he had publicly said he no longer associated with but yet
You see the discussion through email and the financial records showing those payments and then you look at some of the test results and you know we went back and were able to finally get access.
The Cycling Federation did everything in their power to keep us from getting the documents.
We got blood test results for example as well as
prior tests from the 1999 and 2000 tour as well as some samples from the 01 tour to Swiss that weren't followed up on correctly.
We, you know, it was again just the most powerful to this date.
I mean arguably the Russia case was more powerful.
That wasn't our case to handle but the evidence there is, you know, similarly as, you know, significant and compelling as it was in the Postal Services case.
You know, the interesting part and what's really disappointing, I think, and still to this day, is that we gave all of the riders the opportunity to come in and sit down with us and confront the truth and then be part of the solution.
and we also gave that opportunity to Lance Armstrong because our effort was to dismantle the system.
That literally was the term we used around the office because we knew if all we did was, you know, give sanctions to the riders, the athletes, that five years from now we'd be in the same position because the system was dirty and that whether it was team owners, coaches, you know, general managers, people within the sport itself,
they were the ones that knew this was going on and turned a blind eye to it and and we knew we could we could punish the athletes themselves but the system's not going to change and more athletes now you know the athletes in our mind on the spectrum of who are the the most culpable versus close to being even victims you know young 18 17 18 year old kids with no opportunity calls so no education they'd probably be you know unfortunately waiting tables or
Some other, you know, blue-collar job if they weren't making, you know, 500 to a million dollars riding a bike in the Tour de France.
you know to some extent they don't have many choices and so we said look that group is as close to victims as you're going to find they're certainly less culpable now they need to be held accountable too but we're going to give them the opportunity to be truthful and provide us the information to help us clean that system out and we gave Lance that same opportunity and unfortunately he chose not to to do that but tried to run the table and
and essentially as he said, you know, beat us and try to destroy you.
And let's take a step back because, you know, this is exaggeration, you know, I acknowledge that to our listeners, but you're Wyatt Earp, you're the marshal coming into this very dirty town, you walk into the saloon and man, the list of gunslingers, the list of enemies you've got to clean up Deadwood
is huge.
Let's just start with the guys who are running cycling.
They hate you.
I mean, the guys who are actually administering the sport, you know, these are the guys like the NFL.
I'm not accusing the NFL of being like the cycling industry at that time.
I'm not.
I'm just making that comparison.
They're running the league and they hate you.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, no question.
I mean, we had a, you know, we had both publicly and privately, you know, a spat with the head of the UCI at the time.
Which is the head of the, this is, that's the name of the league.
Yeah, that's the head of the commissioners office for the global sport of cycling for an easy comparison to our pro sports.
But yeah, I mean, and, and what's, what's
The World Anti-Doping Agency Umbrella Group
Declan Hill is the CEO and Executive Director of WADA
He's simultaneously refusing to provide us documents, test results, you know, blood, urine, other documents that under the code and under the rules he should provide to us in order to do our job, is obstructing us in that way, and then is also sitting at the WADA table attempting to talk WADA out of cooperating and helping publicly and privately with our investigation.
So
The powers that be, and we know this, and we saw it even before the Armstrong case, go back to the, you know, let's say the Marion Jones case or the Tim Montgomery case or the Floyd Landis case.
You know, there's a lot of money and a lot of people that are satisfied with sport as it is and don't really want to have to expose, you know, the dirty side of it.
And look, we don't take any joy or comfort in doing that either.
But that but that's the job we're tasked to do and clean athletes who rely on the rules to be upheld and are expecting the rules as any rule in society sport or otherwise is there to protect people and give them an equal opportunity to You know have their talent and their sacrifice and their hard work Rewarded by playing by the rules and and that and that and that's our that's our job to ensure that they're protected
That's your job, but you're now up against the guys that are running the sport and
elements within the World Anti-Doping Agency that's supposed to be helping you.
Let's now turn to the guys that write the laws in America, Congress.
They, you know, one month they want to do selfies with Travis Taggart and his team and the next month they're like, hey, we're going to get a petition together to stop your agency, to defund you.
Tell us about that.
Tell us about having those gunslingers go up against you.
Yeah, well, it's, you know, there were, yeah, listen, I think, you know, the rich and powerful, right, like Armstrong and his crew at the time were pulling in every shit they could to avoid consequence.
So it was their, you know, media friends that happy to talk about, but also up on the hill, they were going to great lengths to get people on the hill to
you know see their version of this episode which was totally false and look we just we just walked into the lion's den I mean I think I made four trips to Washington DC within about a four to six week period of time to meet with both leadership on the house side as well as individual members on the senate and house side
and you know I'll never forget and I have immense respect and this is not any sort of political statement but for Senator John McCain because McCain was a big friend of the organizations and not making decisions on individual cases but he knew our motives he knew the rules were fair and he came out in big defense when all this happened and I met with Senator McCain before going into one of the house members who was coming after us very hard and ultimately hit
as you referenced introduced legislation and I just remember Senator McCain saying Travis listen as long as you guys are doing the right thing don't worry about the politics here on the hill all that will sort itself out and I'll never forget walking out of that meeting and just being so you know thankful that someone you know he just had lost the election in 08 but basically the most powerful person on the hill and the nominee for president
is sticking to the rule of law and the fairness of the process and not judging the case or the evidence but allowing the process to work and that's the kind of thing that gives you you know support and the the tailwinds to just go keep doing the job that you're doing and I walked into the next meeting and just kind of sat there and listened and then went through the substantive points of why everything we were doing was the right thing to do and the fair thing to do again not getting into the evidence itself
but just convincing the folks on the hill just just wait.
Yeah but that was I mean I want to give kudos first of all to your dog because I can hear him barking away like the watchdog he is you know because I you know but also to John McCain because that was that was a tough time it was an easy time to be against Yassad and Travis Taggart because you had sexy
Lance Armstrong who knew all the Hollywood gang was dating Cheryl or had dated Cheryl Crow.
And it would have been easy to drop you as many of the politicians were willing to do.
Particularly because there were influential people in the media coming for you.
Tell us a little bit about why and how that media campaign had been organized against you guys trying to clean up sport.
Yeah, you know, I think it was a deliberate
effort obviously to influence it let me back up one second they they Lance Armstrong's people made it clear their goal was to you know they said bankrupt USADA and so they have very powerful friends at the Washington Post in a sports
not about the bike and the second one and so every first run of any news around this case the very fact that we had brought a case against him you know was leaked out by them to that reporter at the Washington Post and it had a and it just had an angle that was you know not fair never gave us an opportunity to even give a different perspective to it and it was a clear effort to try to manipulate
Both the politicians in Washington, D.C.
through the Washington Post, and you know, here in the U.S., most staffers read the Washington Post when they show up, in addition to probably a couple other papers.
So seeing those headlines and those articles framed in the way that they were was all part of that strategy, I think.
Some powerful friends, Matthew McConaughey,
you know actor and you know very well-known celebrity who was friends with with Lance at the time you know started or was tweeting out a petition that they had started to defund USADA um so you know the powers that be that they were able to manipulate you know came together and and were you know all pointing their guns towards us and look it's it's not a fun world to have to live in or through but again I just go back to what I said earlier it's
It's why we're here and if people don't like us doing our job, then shut us down and we'll go find things to do that people do.
You don't want to be a hypocrite.
You're not going to take the salary and not do your job.
Just to touch on Matthew McConaughey, because I've always thought, gosh, I'd like to see McConaughey play Travis Tiger.
Has he ever reached out to apologize?
I mean, because you guys are Texans, you're fellow Texans, you're lean, mean guys.
Has he ever apologized for that?
No, no, no.
Apparently he's teaching a film class down at UT Austin, so I'd love to audit the class at some point.
I bet it'd be pretty
Pretty amazing.
Yeah, I joked, you know, he was he was You know top one or two of my wife's most loved Actors probably like a lot of you know, I was like The country and after that he stayed in the stop top five still right, but but he was out of those first two I bet he was because
Joking aside, you got a bunch of freaks who began doing death threats to you guys.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I think as the media machine spun, as the Hill started doing what they were doing, you know, they put out my phone number and email on the internet.
Your phone number?
Yeah, and encourage people to call and email or whatever.
And so we got a couple death threats.
You know, we got a ton of email and a lot was very supportive, by the way, especially from athletes and coaches who knew what was really going on in cycling and that totally supported our organization to do the right thing.
But there were some, you know, death threats in there and just nasty stuff that these folks were going to do to me or me in front of my kids.
etc.
We, you know, we turned it over to the FBI.
Two of them were prosecuted, so I think a lesson for a lot of people just because you sit behind your computer at 3 in the morning and you think you're anonymous and you feel like you can say whatever you want to say online and it's never gonna come back to you, you know, fair warning.
They both pled to felony counts up in Denver Federal Court.
They didn't go to jail, but they'll have felony records and have
I want to keep talking about Hollywood, and you know this, and our listeners know this as well.
I'm not some big Hollywood guy, but a couple of weeks ago, HBO connected, blah, blah, blah.
They set up a series of meetings
to do a bunch, a TV series on my, some of my books.
And I, I, I, what is the word that Hollywood people use?
I took a meeting.
Cause this is not, this is not me by any way, you know, coffee, latte and things.
Anyway, I met this Hollywood director and they are very big at the moment.
And we started the conversation and they said, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with doping.
Everybody dopes.
What's the problem with doping?
And,
Two things happened.
One was I knew right away this relationship is not going to go anywhere.
And two, I was like, I wish I had Travis.
I wish Travis could suddenly mysteriously, miraculously appear beside me and just put this person, you know, explain.
So give me and now the listeners your response.
What is wrong with doping in sports?
Yeah, listen, I mean, I think it's a lazy and sometimes convenient place to go to people who don't understand and who just love athletes and aren't willing to look at the bigger picture.
Look, I think it's pretty simple.
If we have rules in society, and, you know, we obviously do here in the U.S.
and Canada, we're a rule-abiding society.
So without rules, it would be total anarchy.
Declan Hill
you know institution based on an agreement of the competitors to abide by the rules and those rules are there to protect you know the athletes who are putting all the hard work effort into doing their best sacrificing you know time away from their families many of our olympians are living in poverty um foregoing opportunities to go to college just to represent their country and if they go through that sacrifice and then get robbed by someone who breaks the rule and look whether it's a you know an electric motor
In a bike or, you know, blood bags in the arm, those give a material performance difference and will literally cause someone to win when they shouldn't win.
And that's a world that I don't think anybody likes.
Look, you know, if we have rules in society, we ought to uphold the rules.
If we don't like the rules, now let's have that discussion.
And we can get rid of the rules if we really think that is a good idea.
I don't think that's a good idea, but that's not my call.
That's sport's call.
If sport finally is going to get rid of the rules and it's not cheating, then okay, we'll go out of business as well under that scenario.
But
I'm playing now that Hollywood director's argument here and I'm saying well what about a sport like weightlifting or cycling at that time where everyone was doping and
It would have been better if you just said, hey, everybody gets to dope.
What's your response to that?
Yeah, listen, I think it's another lazy place to go.
Everyone wasn't doping.
And if you talk to Scott Mercier or Darian Baker or some of the other top athletes in the United States during the 90s, what they'll tell you is, look, we were kicked out of the sport because we refused to do what they said we had to do in order to get the contract.
So so enough of everyone was doing it because everyone wasn't doing it.
And those who didn't want to do it got kicked out and run out of the sport.
So can you imagine an industry, let's say it's Hollywood, where you abide by whether it's the ethics rules or the law and you get run out?
And let's not forget, these were criminal violations in France and in Italy.
and in Spain.
While it wasn't criminal in the U.S.
at the time, although the trafficking certainly was, you basically have to become a criminal to participate in your sport.
I don't think that's a world any of us want for sport to become.
They kicked out the ones that were unwilling to do it, but those that stayed in the sport, they weren't all doing it either.
Because there were plenty that have come out publicly, but who were there that didn't participate in it.
And it doesn't make it even.
And you look at the Brunel decision, for example, and it's what came really clear, not from Travis Tigard or USADA, but from the judges in that case.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I'm not familiar with that.
Yeah, so I apologize.
So Bernil was the team director of the U.S.
Postal Service.
Okay, that's Lance Armstrong's team.
Yeah, yeah.
And what was really clear is that they held on to the drugs that worked the best, mainly the blood transfusions, and they only gave that to one or two of the riders on the team.
because they gave you an advantage that no one else had.
So even within this system where a lot of athletes were using the drugs on the U.S.
public... So there was the peasant class, the economy... The audio just cut out about 10 seconds ago.
Would you mind going back two sentences?
Yeah, that was my audio, Eric.
At least on my end.
Yeah, it was before Declan started talking.
Okay.
Yeah, so even within the group of U.S.
Postal Service's riders that were provided drugs by the team, they had a hierarchy where, yeah, there was a peasant class who got some of the, you know, maybe testosterone, maybe a little human growth hormone, but the gold standard, if you're going to dope, was blood transfusions, and they specifically held that
only for the top of the pyramid, Lance Armstrong and maybe one or two other riders who were able to get access to that drug.
So even within, this lazy argument about how everyone was doing it, no.
They kicked the ones out that weren't willing to do it.
Even within the Peloton, some stayed that suffered a lot more, but they stayed and didn't do it.
But even amongst those that did it, there was an unfair hierarchy that gave those at the top the best drugs in order to allow them to win.
Two points to that.
One is that, you know, in your need to answer this quick and concisely, we haven't even, you haven't even talked about all the guys that died and the East Germans who were transformed and the people who died in the early days of EPO.
And, and the second thing is that there's a, there's a guy that mends bikes in my little biking store that in my
Declan Hill
I'm going back and I'm going to mend bikes.
That's what I'm doing.
And there's thousands, tens of thousands of athletes who've made the right decision.
And those are the people who tend to get forgotten in this decision and in this discussion.
Yeah, those are the people that ought to be celebrated.
I mean, I think fortunately, you know, we've had individual communication with and contact and built relationships with many of them, and they're confident in their decision.
And I think Scott Mercier was the one who said on the Today Show around this, you know, being interviewed about the case, who said, listen, I'm glad I'm not having to sit down with my kids right now and tell them that all my success was based on me being a fraud.
So while they weren't the celebrities, they didn't win as they should have, and some of them may have been the best cyclists the U.S.
has ever produced, I think they're all confident in the decision that it was the right decision for them to make it at the time, and certainly they should be the ones who are celebrated in all of this.
Let me ask you, you know, because, you know, you're very modest, you passed over a fair amount of pressure and stress and death threats that people were putting on you.
Everyone has a moral compass in their inside themselves.
Who helped form your moral compass?
Yeah, you know, listen, I think many, many, many, many people along the way, right?
I mean, probably, obviously having, you know, my parents, my dad was a lawyer and always taught us to, you know, treat people with respect and fairly and do the right thing, even when it's tough to do.
You know, my grandfather, I think of was a
The Code of Silence
have all been a very influential part of my life and the view that I take.
Is there one particular piece of advice, one saying that you hold true to?
You know, I think it's just, you know, treat people how you want to be treated.
I mean, it's the code, I think, right?
and and and knowing um you know I spent some time at the public defender's office and and seeing um you know representing um people accused of crimes and and seeing those stories and sort of the circumstances that lead people to make the decisions that they make and and always just having compassion for for others and and the predicament that they're in and I think some of that was what led us to the decision to have the athletes come in and be part of the solution.
right because I could put myself in their shoes and know the pressures that they faced as hyper competitive and really really good athletes to gain a little bit of an advantage when the system itself turned a blind eye to the poor decisions that they were forced to make and so having compassion and how you treat other people and seeing the world from their perspective and adjusting to that as best you can without bending or certainly not breaking the rules that you're there to enforce I think is really important and
and the job that we have here at USADA.
Let me ask you a controversial question, because it's one that always, you know, the night goes down, the alcohol goes up, and people say, yeah, you know, the Americans took down, you know, cleaned up Lance Armstrong's, you know, doping thing.
But that never would have happened if Lance Armstrong had been French.
The French never would have done that.
The Italians never would have done that.
The Spanish would have never done that.
Do you think that this is a case of American exceptionalism?
You know, listen, while it's hard, I think we don't we don't think in those kind of terms, you know, we really put our focus on our North Star.
which is to do everything that we've sworn to do for the good of clean athletes and enforce the rules fairly, robustly, even if it's tough to do.
And look, while Lance Armstrong's case may be tough to do,
you know having to sanction um you know a mother who may lose her spot on a team that is gonna you know is not a household name but is gonna lose some of their income i mean that's that's equally as tough if not more tough um you know particularly
Particularly if it, you know, deals with some medical situation and is not really what an intentional cheating situation should look like.
So, you know, I don't get into the characterizations of those in that way.
We just simply do the right thing for the right reasons for our athletes.
You know why I asked that question because the challenge or one of your challenges right now is the new geopolitical cold war in sports where the Russians and the International Olympic Committee is
Reportedly on one side of the fence.
WADA, World Anti-Doping Agency, we're not entirely sure where they are.
Sometimes they're on one side of the block, sometimes they're on the other.
And there's a whole bunch of national anti-doping associations that are just saying, what is going on?
How can our athletes, be it they're from Canada, US, UK, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, France, wherever.
How can our athletes go to somewhere like the Olympics and expect to perform clean if this system is so badly rigged?
Tell us your thoughts on that.
Yeah well that that's the I mean in addition to making sure we're focused on doing our job here in the U.S.
to ensure our clean U.S.
athletes have every opportunity to win not just compete but win clean you know it the whole system falls apart if if one country whether it's us or any of the ones you just mentioned who are trying to do the right thing as well end up sending their athletes to international competition Olympic games or otherwise and they end up losing
Declan Hill
We ask WADA to do the job that they're tasked to do.
We want a strong, independent WADA.
The problem and our concern at WADA, you know, in the last six years it was run, the president was also an IOC executive board member.
That's the IOC is the International Olympic Committee.
Those are the guys that run the Olympics.
And he was also serving with those guys.
That's right.
So, he's got a conflict of interest.
It's like the referee putting on the jersey of the New York Yankees and then taking it off and going out to reportedly umpire the game.
You got it.
I mean, you know, what I always say is the fox guarding the hen house, but your analogy is even better.
It's the referee is a got money bet on the Yankees, let's say, and literally because they're promoting
The IOC members promote the Olympics.
They need Russia in the Olympics because that's good for business and NBC wants to see the head-to-head competition.
So there is a conflict and I think it is so crystal clear.
It's common sense.
You don't have the mafia boss sitting on the police board making decisions of who's going to be enforced or not.
If you've ever seen the movie Peaky Blinders, it's a great example.
The Netflix show.
Absolutely, because I want to add a personal story here which I think you're involved in.
September 2016, Lausanne, things are so desperate between World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Olympic Committee that they phone up this Canadian journalist academic and I fly over to do a keynote speech for these guys.
And we're all in this conference room all together, you know, WADA, IOC, and we're all having this kind of cordial fight.
And at that time, FSB Russian spies are going through our hotel room, hacking into computers, hacking into stuff, putting up cameras to record stuff that's going on there.
So this was far above just a doping thing.
This got into a kind of spy world.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the Russians and let's hope no other states, but until we know, we don't know.
You know, you sport as a tool of the foreign affairs effort, and it is absolutely a political arm of the government.
And so what you've seen is their effort to
you know cheat the world and win and you look back at the Sochi results where I think in 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver I think they finished seventh out of fifth out you know beyond they weren't in the top five well all of a sudden the Sochi winter games happened in Russia in 2014 and they're now number one on the medal count
That doesn't happen in a four-year period of time.
And we now know it didn't happen rightly because it was all based on, in large part, their state-sponsored doping system.
And so they're using sport now to assert, you know, power or whatever on the global scale.
And I think we have to be realistic that that's what some are willing to do.
And as a result, we need bodies like the International Olympic Committee
like the World Anti-Doping Agency that aren't addicted to the money, that aren't going to bow down to the power of the influence, but are going to do what we try to do day in and day out, Lance Armstrong case or otherwise, is just simply do the right thing for clean athletes.
Let me be fair and balanced here because part of the Russian state-sponsored pushback against this was a
systemic hacking.
The Fancy Bears guys came at USADA, they came at a bunch of other things, and they hacked into the computer databases for doping.
And to be fair, although they obtained it criminally, there was a number of questionable questions that would come up about Western doping practice.
There seemed to be a whole bunch of athletes that were asthmatic and suffer from asthma that seemed winning a lot.
What's your response to that?
Yeah, listen, one, obviously the hacking is unacceptable and we were thrilled the federal government here indicted 11 that were behind those hacks and criminally, you know, invading our systems or WADA systems, you know, shouldn't happen.
All that said, I mean, I think what our athletes said, hey, we're an open book.
and they have been an open book so any of those cases where someone received treatment for whether it was asthma or ADHD or some other ailment there's a set of rules that applies to those situations and both WADA and the International Federation were all notified of those grants of
any medications, and they were all in accordance strictly with the rules.
And so our athletes, I mean, I loved it from, you know, Elena Della Donne, who was a basketball player, Simone Biles, a couple of these athletes said, hey, you know, Russians, thanks for hacking, and you just proved to the world that I follow the rules.
So that's all that they did.
Now, while they tried to spin it as something different,
It's, you know, it's the epitome of fake news to buy into that.
And these athletes did, you know, were totally innocent and completely complied with the rules that we asked them to comply with.
Travis, I want to thank you for your time today.
I also want to thank you for holding true, in your words, to that North Star for the clean athletes and fighting this.
Thank you so much for coming and joining us this morning.
Declan, it's always great to talk with you and I really appreciate the invitation to be here and look forward to talking with you more in the future.
And thank you very much.
Awesome.
It's just, I've just got a please excuse me, Travis.
I've just got to run to the washroom.
My coffee thing is coming to back to get me.
Please excuse me.
I know the guys will want to pick up on a few questions.
Just give me two seconds.
Yeah, you bet.
That was terrific.
Yeah, we good?
Did you get what you need?
Alright, good.
Wow, that is an amazing, it's just amazing.
You know?
The Lance Armstrong story?
Yeah, yeah.
Ugh.
I mean, it's like, you know, the anchor, I've described it as the anchor that I can't cut off of my left.
No, I think it's the halo for the organization that will last a lifetime, so I don't know.
I was so glad when you guys got him.
To be honest with you, hadn't there been rumors for a while?
Yeah, a lot of smoke that was out there.
Travis, if you wouldn't mind, one final question that I realized I hadn't asked.
Are we still recording, Eric?
Yes.
Travis, given what you're saying, is there any hope for a clean Olympics if it's in Tokyo next year or whenever?
Can we confidently expect there to be a clean Olympics?
Listen, I really hope so.
One, if we do our job and others do the job as well as required and supposed to do under the rules, then yeah, I think it could be potentially the cleanest Olympic Games we've seen ever, actually.
And you look back at London, that was frankly dirty.
Over a hundred retests that were positive.
The Russians and others tainted those games.
Sochi, we know what happened.
Unfortunately in Rio, the headlines in advance of that were, are the Russians going to be there?
Should they be there?
They all came in full force, same in PyeongChang.
So there's not a good track record over, you know, going back to 2012 on the games being what they should be, which is a celebration of the rule of law, fair play, and clean sport.
There's a lot of work that has to be done.
COVID has obviously interfered with that to a large extent, but in a way it has also, given the postponement, bought time for the organizations that are supposed to be executing a robust testing program to do so.
And that six months before the games really is the critical time when that robust program has to be in place.
Travis, I want to invite you back just
in that spring as we're coming up into Tokyo to revisit this question, because it's a massive one.
And we've just skipped and danced very lightly over this whole thing with Russia.
And I'd really like to unpack that then.
Hopefully, it'll be much more optimistic talk.
Hopefully, it'll be we've won the battle or the good guys have won the battle at that moment.
Yeah and listen I think I think I think the good guys in individual sports one I think there is hope they can win but I think you're also seeing that they're actually able to win now and no better testament to it you may have seen we rolled out at the beginning of COVID when we knew the testing was going to be reduced a virtual testing program where we literally called up I think it ended up being 17 or 18 of the nation's top athletes Katie Ledecky
Travis, I can't imagine, it's just my cynical skeptical thing because in the middle of COVID we had Richard McLaren, yet again a man who
Where's the cape and is working hard for cleaning up sport did yet another massive investigation on weightlifting.
And it was clear that was beyond the top athletes.
It was what you were talking about at the beginning of our interview a systemic culture of cheating inside that sport going right the way to the top.
No question, and look, wonderful work.
And what's frustrating to us, back to my earlier point and that scenario, he was a foundation board member.
The head of IWF was a foundation board member.
International Weightlifting Federation.
International Weightlifting.
So the president of International Weightlifting was a foundation board member, IOC member for one.
as well as a foundation board member at WADA from 1999 until the end of 2017.
So simultaneously while he sits around the conference table making decisions about clean sport and then using that position to hold himself out as someone that's about clean sport, we now know he was accepting money to cover up over 40 cases of positive tests of the elite of the elite in that sport.
That's a system that just can't simply sustain itself.
But my point, Declan, is that there are individual athletes who want to be the true heroes that we all want them to be.
They don't want to be frauds.
And they know there's a significant chance if they do become a fraud that they're going to get caught and exposed and humiliated.
So they're not going down that path, but they're doing the right thing.
And it used to be that they had a hard time to win.
But I think today, thanks to the system here in the U.S.
and other countries around the world that are doing the right thing, they have not only the hope that they can win, but they're actually winning.
And they're willing to take on even more additional volunteer testing virtually, as I described, to show that they're clean.
And then I really, I really hope you're right.
And both for their sakes and for all of our sakes, I haven't even touched on international Olympic boxing.
We're going to be doing whole programs on that because it's really difficult to overstate the depth of corruption in Olympic boxing.
I mean, really difficult to overstate how bad it is.
But look, Travis, again, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for your work and all the guys at USADA for fighting.
Hey, it's Declan here.
Just a note.
Look, if you have any doubts about what was said in today's program, and if you're curious at all,
While I was researching and preparing for the interview, I went to the USADA website and I had found that trove of documents that Taggart mentioned in the interview.
It's posted at www.cyclinginvestigation.usada.org.
We also have a link on our website, but cyclinginvestigation.usada.org.
It is thousands of pages long.
It's clear.
They have compelling testimonies and documentation as to exactly what was going on.
Thank you so much for listening.
We very much value your time and attention, and please join us next week when we have another episode of the miniseason Bloodsports on Crimewaves.