Sporting Spies
A column about sporting spying, theft and subterfuge. For the Irish Times.
The famous tale from 2003 of the Gloucester gameplan left in a Limerick taxi always sounded too good to be true: the visitors’ strategy for a crucial game quietly passed on to the home team who would go on to get each and every one of the four tries and 27-point margin they needed in an improbable 33-6 win. The story was flat out denied by a Gloucester spokesperson but it lives on. Another addition to the Thomond Park legend.
Twelve years later across the Atlantic there is a case of sporting corporate espionage. The St Louis Cardinals are being investigated for the unauthorised access of a database owned by the Houston Astros. While an original leak of internal Houston emails and memos regarding trade discussions that came to light in 2014 had been a source of some embarrassment – imagine a Premier League club’s old internal notes about their signing targets being revealed – it had also triggered an FBI investigation that led to St Louis. Hacking (or, more accurately, successfully guessing that a former Cardinals employee might use the same password upon moving to the Astros) is not something the feds look upon kindly.
Information obtained by an opponent will leave ill feeling. Cardiff City were livid after losing 3-0 to Crystal Palace in April 2014 and allegations emerged that the Cardiff starting line-up and formation had been leaked to the Palace backroom team by text message before the game. As with the “hack”, people proved the weak point in the chain.
The sliding scale of deception and subterfuge in sport can be somewhat fluid with words like gamesmanship and cheating used interchangeably depending on whether the loser or victor is telling the story.
