The Trondheim Diaries: my week with investigators and whistleblowers
The Play The Game conference in Norway was informative, revealing, fun and, in the end, surprisingly emotional
I’ve spent most of the past week in Trondheim, Norway, at the Play The Game conference (PTG). I wrote about the history of PTG on Monday. Today I’m going to share the working week of a journalist at the conference and introduce you to a range of colleagues from all over the world who do the same kind of stuff as I do.
I’m not going to introduce you to the former WADA employee who told me at a previous PTG that Usain Bolt tested positive for Clenbuterol, a banned performance-enhancing drug, at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Bolt won the 100m in a world record 9.69 seconds in China and then won the 200m in a world record 19.30 seconds.
Jamaica won 11 athletics medals in Beijing, and when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) retested urine samples years after those Games, they said “very low levels of Clenbuterol” were found in multiple athletes from a number of countries and different sports. No names were specified, but my source says Bolt was among those involved.
The IOC’s formal position was that the Clenbuterol positives were “in the range of potential meat contamination cases” (it is true that you can test positive for Clenbuterol from eating certain contaminated meats).
It would be great if the IOC and other relevant bodies had been more transparent about what happened, but I can also understand why you wouldn’t want the most generationally talented and successful athlete of his era to be linked to a ‘doping’ incident.
I’m also not going to introduce you to the former FIFA employee who I met at PTG years ago, who helped me confirm that Sepp Blatter’s former No.2, Jerome Valcke, was a ticket tout, a revelation that cost him his job.
And I’m not going to introduce you to the various cogs in a match-fixing racket who helped me expose corruption in Australian and non-league English football.
I’ve met so many fascinating people at PTG since I first went to a PTG conference in 2009: athletes, politicians, crooks, match-fixers, investigators, academics, administrators, governing body folk, and all manner of people in recovery … from the dark side of sport.
The original incarnation of Sporting Intelligence would sometimes delve into journalistic process, if only to demonstrate to readers ‘how the sausage is made’. Now and again on this Substack reboot, I’ll be doing the same. So here goes: my Trondheim travelogue.
Friday February 2
I arrive at the airport at 10.30am in good time for my 1pm flight. As I walk to the check-in zone to offload my bag, I receive a text from Norwegian (the airline). My flight is going to be two and a half hours late. I have five hours to kill. Fortunately, the text also says that a ‘refreshment voucher’ of £6 has been attached to my boarding pass. This covers 57% of the cost of one glass of red wine, which I have for lunch.
I spend a few hours finishing off the speech I’ll be giving on Monday morning, then head to the plane, where I’m in seat 31A, at the back on the left. Four passengers board with seats assigned to row 32. There is no row 32. Two of them are accommodated in spare seats near me and the other two are told to go to First Class.
We land around 6pm at a cold and snowy Oslo airport and I catch the train into town, which is fast and costs about £20. I get a taxi from Central station to my hotel which costs about £20. I have dinner with a friend – an Oslo resident – and in a bar afterwards buy us each a drink, which costs about £20.
It seems that every tap of the card for anything in Norway costs about £20, or more. At Central station I buy a coffee and a panini at Starbucks, for about £20. The only thing that comes in at substantially under £20 is when I go for a pee at Lillehammer station on Saturday. That costs only 75 pence. You know what makes intrepid journalism like this work, even at these extortionate prices? Generous and supportive readers who fund the work of the writers they trust by becoming a paid subscriber. Thanks, guys.
Saturday 3 February
There are no direct flights from the UK to Trondheim, so I was always going to have to travel via Oslo. A combination of wanting to catch up with an old friend and a preference for the scenic route means I opt for a train from Oslo to Trondheim. But a few days before travelling I received an email saying the first two hours, to Lillehammer, will be on the train, then the next five hours or so will be on a rail replacement bus service.
The Oslo-Lillehammer train journey is enriched by strangers who quickly turn the chat to English football. One supports Liverpool and another Manchester United. There has been a fervent support for English football across much of Scandinavia for decades. One of my favourite pieces I commissioned for Sporting Intelligence was Andreas Selliaas’s boy’s own tale of his adoration for Bob Latchford, and Everton.
Cutting a long story short, we get to Lillehammer, where I have my 75p wee, and then the bus takes six and a half hours to Trondheim, via stunning scenery, three blizzards, precipitous drops at the side the of the road, and more bumps than I’d expected.
I am on the upper deck, and the Wi-Fi works the whole way, which is a saving grace. I watch the third episode of the AppleTV+ series Masters of the Air, a drama based on the experiences of American Air Force pilots based in the UK during the second World War. It is getting dark outside as I start watching, and the journey is turbulent. Much of the show features aerial battles. The combination of bus ride and drama is hairy.
I then turn to Radio Solent via the internet to listen to Southampton win 2-0 away at Rotherham. The bus driver has to stop about halfway through the second half to let a snow plough and gritter clear the road.
About nine hours after leaving my Oslo hotel, I am dropped off on a bridge in central Trondheim, and within minutes of arriving at my hotel, Samindra Kunti messages to say he’s brought three bottles of beer from home (Belgium) and he’d like to share them with me. Sam writes for Josimar, and the BBC, and The Blizzard and World Soccer (among others). He wrote Brazil 1970: How the greatest team of all time won the World Cup.
He is 35, Belgian, went to Columbia Journalism School and spends his life travelling around the world writing about important issues in sport, from basic integrity – or lack of – in global sport, to workers’ rights. It’s not glamorous and it’s certainly not lucrative, but Sam is one of dozens of similar writers and journalists at Play The Game.
We head for dinner, a group of six of us who all fall into the same line of work, six among a few dozen who do similar things and will cross paths a few times each year, covering stories or at conferences.
You probably already know some or most of the people I’m going to mention in this piece (and do follow them if you’re interested in sports integrity), but Sam and I are joined for dinner by Philippe Auclair, Andreas Selliaas, Steve Menary and Andy Brown.
Philippe doesn’t love flying at the best of times and over dinner he regales us with the story of his flight to Trondheim, which he insists is among the worst he’s ever experienced, thanks to the snow and storms that my bus went through at ground level.
Andy has also just flown in and was slightly perturbed by an equally rough landing. He tells us: “It was one of those that ends with everyone clapping the pilot.”
Late on Saturday night, back at the conference hotel, we stay up to wait for friends and colleagues getting in late, including Tariq Panja, Katarina Pijetlovic and James Corbett. There will be 400 people at PTG and among those I know well and admire most are those already mentioned and, to name just a few others, Håvard Melnæs, Steffi Ndei, Jan Jensen, Grit Hartmann, Olof Lundh and Pål Ødegård.
Sunday 4 February
The opening session of the conference includes speeches by PTG’s main organiser Stanis Elsborg, the mayor of Trondheim, Kent Ranum, the Godfather of PTG Jens Sejer Andersen, and Andriy Chesnokov from Ukraine’s Ministry of Sport, among others. Joanna Maranhão concludes the session with a hugely moving insight into her life as an Olympic swimmer and how she is navigating the trauma of abuse.
I chair the first plenary session of the conference: ‘Illegal gambling in sport: The trillion‐dollar question that no one seems to grasp.’
Frédéric van Leeuw is Belgium’s federal prosecutor who spends much of his time tackling organised crime and terrorism and has also worked on high-profile murder cases and the shooting down of MH17.
He talks about the catastrophic impact of normalising corruption in sport. Journalist and filmmaker Zoe Flood talks about the explosion of sports betting across Africa and the potential for risk to fans in lightly regulated markets. Other speakers include Ann Lukowiak from Belgium, who tells us about match-fixing in tennis, and Philippe Auclair, who explains how sports betting has made elite football complicit with criminal activity and human rights abuses.
Play The Game is a hardcore conference: sessions start at 9am and are non-stop through to 10pm most nights. Tonight the evening session features Khalida Popal, the founder and director of the Girl Power Organisation in Afghanistan and then Lise Klaveness, the hugely impressive president of the Norwegian Football Association.
Monday 5 February
The first session of the day is a re-evaluation of the Qatar 2022 World Cup, posing the question whether (Western) media were biased, bigoted and boorish in their coverage. I’m up first with a 10-minute talk about 12 years of misdirection from Qatar, which I wrote about on Monday (that piece contains a version of the speech, with links to sources and documents).
One of the other speakers, academic Craig LaMay, a professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, is gently scathing about the lack of freedom of speech in Qatar, and media freedom, while Lars Haue‐Pedersen, a spin doctor for Qatar from Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW) takes a lot of flack for trying to defend the indefensible.
As soon as the session ends – and the Q&A got as lively as you’d expect – I went to watch Professor Richard McLaren (the man who did the investigation that detailed Russia’s state doping) and Martin Dubbey (an investigator who worked with him on that case) talk about a tool they have developed to catch dopers.
Simplifying a massively complex subject, they aim to use AI voice analysis technology to identify ‘high-risk’ athletes, and eradicate much of the $300m of conventional drug tests done each year. I’ll come back to this subject in more detail soon.
It’s fair to say there were a lot of sceptics in the room, me included, but I can absolutely see how this tool might form part of a multi-pronged intelligence-based approach to anti-doping.
Having been in Trondheim for about 36 hours and feeling like it’s been about a week, me and Tariq take a walk through the snow to Trondheim’s lovely cathedral, and then, back at the hotel, sit down for a chat with Lise Klaveness, grilling her on governance and transparency.
There are still two more two-hour sessions to go today. First, a panel titled ‘The Saudis are coming: How should world sport react to a new global sports order?’ The speakers include dissident and campaigner Lina Alhathloul, whose sister Loujain was arrested, tortured and threatened with death, for campaigning for women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia.
The last panel of the day ran from 8pm to 10pm and examined the future of sports journalism.
A few of us stay up to carry on the debate over some beers and single malt … far too late.
Tuesday 6 February
Tariq messages first thing to say he’s had a change of heart about going swimming (we were going to go to Trondheim’s swimming complex) and fancies a big walk instead. We head out with Andreas and follow the river south and it’s a gorgeous – if freezing – morning by the river, sheets of ice flowing up the middle.
I get back to the hotel, and work, then head out to ‘Super Hero Burger’ for lunch. Tariq tags along, and then Katarina joins us and we spend an hour talking about Palestine and Israel, and how utterly fucked the world will be if Donald Trump gets elected this year.
I go back and do more work, and then do an interview for ARD television in Germany. They are particularly interested in Manchester City, and I talk about the issues I raised in this piece, and in this piece.
The evening session runs from 8pm to 10pm and involves speakers talking about whether or how there might ever be a body that is effectively a World Anti-Corruption Agency. It’s interesting stuff but I don’t see it happening: the world’s major governing bodies – from the IOC to FIFA – wield so much power, and there is no agency with the global power and appetite to regulate them.
Wednesday 7 February
My main job today is to chair the final big session of the conference, titled: ‘Paris 2024 and future Olympics: Beacons of peace or tokens of war?’
It basically comprises five presentations and then a debate about whether Russia should or shouldn’t be banned from sport for its war on Ukraine. Speakers include IOC member
Kristin Kloster, the hugely impressive Ukranian Olympian Vlad Heraskevych and the president of Denmark’s national Olympic committee, Hans Natorp.
The conference closes with a dinner on Wednesday night, where the organisers make their biennial ‘Play The Game Award’ which their website says “pays tribute to an individual or a group of persons who in their professional careers or as volunteers in sport have made an outstanding effort to strengthen the basic ethical values of sport.”
Followers of mine on Twitter will be well aware of my wife Helen’s illness, and then her death from brain cancer in 2020. It’s Helen’s birthday today.
I’m stunned to find out I’ve won this year’s Play The Game award, along with Grit Hartmann of Germany. I find it hard not to cry. I tell the room it’s Helen’s birthday. About 400 people are now crying. And then we all go to the pub.
Congratulations on the award & fully deserved, thanks for the links to the other journalists also
A wonderful read Nick, congratulations again. And what a wonderful prize!