GENEVA (AP) — Sign stealing in baseball. Match fixing in soccer. Doping allegations in swimming. Now ski jumping has its own scandal that escalated Wednesday.
Cheating by Norway team officials manipulating ski suits has shaken a national reputation for fair play and high-minded principles at their home Nordic world championships, where the host team dominated the medal table.
Two Olympic gold medalists, Marius Lindvik and Johann André Forfang, had denied involvement since the allegations emerged over the weekend but were suspended Wednesday and put under formal suspicion in an investigation overseen by the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS). They cannot compete in a World Cup event in Oslo that starts Thursday.
Lindvik and Forfang already had been disqualified from the large hill event in Trondheim held Saturday, days after Lindvik soared to become world champion on the normal hill.
Though both athletes were backed by the Norwegian team insisting they knew nothing about deliberately altered ski suits, their head coach Magnus Brevig and equipment manager Adrian Livelten confessed and were stood down from their jobs.
“FIS has provisionally suspended three Norwegian team officials and two athletes who are being investigated for their alleged involvement in illegal equipment manipulation,” the Switzerland-based governing body said in a statement.
An assistant coach, Thomas Lobben, also is part of a probe in which FIS-appointed investigators seized all of the home Norway team's suits used at the worlds.
The scandal has shocked the ski jumping world, raising questions about how widespread this practice is, and tarnished Norway’s standing for honesty in sports.
What has emerged involves team officials manipulating pre-approved and microchipped suits to increase their size and improve aerodynamics to help athletes fly further.
It was revealed in footage secretly filmed from behind a curtain then sent by a whistleblower to international media. A FIS official said the illegal alterations were only subsequently confirmed by tearing apart the seams of the crotch area on the offending Norwegian ski suits.
The scandal has unfolded in Norway which always scores high in Transparency International’s anti-corruption index, tied for fifth in the most recent global ranking.
Norwegian sports officials also led on controversial issues by taking public positions in 2022 in refusing to host Russian athletes days after the full invasion of Ukraine and challenging soccer World Cup host Qatar on human rights.
The same Norwegian ski federation that helped push FIS to exclude Russians three years ago now finds its staff and star athletes under investigation by the governing body.
“The only thing that matters for FIS is to leave this process 100% convinced that the sport is free from any form of manipulation,” its secretary general Michel Vion said in a statement.
Athletes and officials from across the world left Trondheim on Sunday sad and disappointed, FIS race director for men’s ski jumping Sandro Pertile told The Associated Press in an interview.
“Norway is a country that we all know as a leader in human rights, in equality, integration. I cannot believe that there is a (cheating) system,” Pertile said in an online call Tuesday, suggesting there was “a few individuals that went really far over the limits.”
If the infractions seemed obscure and technical to non-fans, the breach of trust was severe: “This action was somehow killing our principles, our style, our joy for our discipline,” Pertile said.
The Norwegian federation acted when FIS officials found evidence that proved what the secret footage alleged, and had led to formal protests from Austria, Slovenia and Poland.
Brevig and Livelten admitted they had cheated, though just on one occasion, ahead of the large hill event held Saturday.
“We regret it like dogs, and I’m terribly sorry that this happened,” Brevig said. “I don’t really have anything else to say other than that we got carried away in our bubble.”
Livelten apologized to the disqualified athletes plus “sponsors, the jumping family and the Norwegian people” for an act of cheating he said was “completely unacceptable.”
How did Norway cheat?
“It was an extremely high-level manipulation,” race director Pertile said of the Norwegian actions that were “absolutely by far the worst” in his five years in the job. “We destroyed the suit to be able to find this adjustment.”
The Italian official said alterations were not detected by eye and only were revealed by examining the seams of the crotch area of the ski suits after the competition.
Extra material in the same color had been inserted that added weight and helped to lower the material between an athlete's legs as they took off into the flight phase. More surface area hitting the air helps add to flight time, Pertile said.
FIS previously said a 5% bigger surface area of a suit helps an athlete fly further, though the exact distance added is not known, Pertile said.
What are the rules?
FIS has an 11-page document of rules for measuring and verifying ski jumpers' suits during the season. Multiple RFID chips are attached and noted on a FIS register, after which a suit must not be altered. Any attempt to remove a chip should make the suit ineligible and the chips are deactivated.
One suit is allowed at World Cup events and two more for a world championships or Winter Olympics, though just one is used on each competition day.
What is the investigation about?
FIS investigators now have seized all Norwegian suits used in men's and women's ski jumping and Nordic combined at the world championships.
Lindvik's gold medal in normal hill is sure to be looked at, though it is unclear how far back an investigation could reach for results at World Cup events this season or beyond to previous seasons. Lindvik was Olympic champion in large hill at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games.
The ski jumping World Cup season continues for three more weekends, starting Thursday in Oslo.
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AP sports: https://apnews.com/sports
Graham Dunbar, The Associated Press
