It's a new first for the Olympic Games, but not one the Canadian women's football team will be allowed to forget for a while.
Gabi Rennie of the New Zealand Football Ferns in a game against the Canadian women's national team in Montreal in October 2021. Photo: Minas Panagiotakis / www.photosport.nz
It's proven a shameless and scandalous own goal, and the Canadians are now paying the highest sporting price for spying on the Football Ferns at the Olympics.
The coach has been sent home in disgrace, the team has been docked six vital points and the fine is in excess of $350,000.
Their reputation is in tatters. They are golden girls no more. The global contenders are now cheating pretenders, who have dragged the beautiful game into murky scandal and shame.
It's big news in Paris, as questions swirl about who knew what and when.
"Up until now, all the scandals have involved performance enhancing drugs," says RNZ sports journalist Jamie Wall. "In terms of spying, this is a new one for the Olympics."
Today on The Detail he runs through the background and the timeline, and we look at other sport spying scandals that made headlines.
Here's how this one started:
The Canadian women's team - the defending Olympic champs - were caught spying on New Zealand ahead of their opening game.
A drone, operated by a Canadian official, was flown over the Kiwis' training session. When confronted, Canada went from attack to defence and damage control.
"It's sort of turned into how a political scandal would play out," said Wall. "First off you are going to blame it on a junior staffer, oh then it turns out a few other people knew about it, then it turns out the head coach not only knew about it, but has probably done it before and told these people to do it."
That head coach is Bev Priestman, who is married to a Kiwi and used to live in New Zealand, and is a previous winner of the IFFHS Women's World Best National Coach award.
She's now been sent home from the Games in disgrace, and suspended by FIFA for a year.
This week, she apologised profusely to her players and the nation. So can she recover from this, or is it all over?
"I think it will be a long road back for her to recover from this," Wall says.
"I'm pretty shocked about it myself."
Wall interviewed her when she was here for the women's FIFA world cup and says like most people in sport, she's really nice.
One of the puzzling things about the spying escapade is why the defending champions would pick on New Zealand.
"The Canadian women's football team is a strong side, they are a very good team, they were probably hoping to make the knock outs and challenge for a medal," says Wall.
"The Football Ferns haven't had a good track record in the last, well, forever, the joke was that perhaps the drone pilot got lost and he was trying to fly over the English or Spanish teams' training facility. Jokes aside, it shows by doing this, it's probably happened before because you wouldn't start off with a team you were favoured to beat anyway. And I think reading between the lines it was something people had suspected from the Canadians of doing for a while now."
There are reports that Canadian officials were forced to pilot drones or face losing their jobs. And it allegedly dates back to when the team won gold at Tokyo.
So should they be stripped of their medals?
"It's not out of the question, taking away Olympic medals for cheating has clearly happened in the past.
"This would be a new one, they would have to set a precedent around this, but if they can gather enough evidence that it has happened in the past, I wouldn't put it past the IOC to take some drastic action."
He says spying is common in sport. The All Blacks, for example, are well aware of others keeping a "close eye" on their training sessions - and are prepared.
"I remember last year I was at the World Cup with the All Blacks and we were allowed into their training venue one day and they had the usual security around and they had a guy sitting on the table with a little screen in front of him and an assault rifle next to him. I remember asking him 'what is this for?' and he said 'this is for drones, I'm here to shoot down anything that flies over the field'. That's how seriously they were taking it.
"Obviously the Football Ferns didn't have a guy like that, obviously this could have been resolved with one shot."
In spite of their reputation for being the nice guys of the word, Canada has shameless spying form. It was two Canadians, after all, who famously slipped into scuba diving gear to spy on Australia's boat in the America's Cup more than 40 years ago.
Kiwi journalist Larry Keating knows those details, inside out, and tells the story on The Detail today.
He says spying and the America's Cup have long gone hand and hand, long been a big problem, but this year there's been a major change and videos of training and interviews are not only shared between crews, but are loaded up to the cloud where the public has access too.
So for the first time in America's Cup history, the spy versus spy games are over.
"I think they realised it was too tricky and the other reason they have gone down this road is it was costing so much money," says Keating.
"It was costing them a fortune in boats, fuel, people and manpower, they will be very happy to get rid of it."
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