While the Olympic show goes on – the doping, gambling addiction and sexual abuse of athletes continues…

It is with the skepticism of a long-time, sports integrity investigator that I watch the Paris Olympics. I love sports but every time I watch such a spectacle I am aware of what is behind the screen, what is occurring to hundreds of the young athletes at such events while the officials who are supposed to safeguard sports downplay any problems.

On CrimeWaves, I have re-released four superb interviews.

The bravest man in sports – Vitaly Stepanov who, along with his wife, showed the scale of doping in the Russian Olympic team in an extraordinary covert investigation which has left them, still ten years later, in hiding.

Martin Dubbey, one of the top investigators in the world speaking about the “mafia” that ran International Track and Field for years and took bribes of millions of dollars from corrupted athletes and sports officials.

Nancy Hogshead, the triple gold medal winner, who dedicates her career to protecting athletes from abuse.

Travis Tygart – the heroic head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency who faced down the Washington, Hollywood establishments and death threats in the investigation of Lance Armstrong with the code of silence around his team’s doping.

All of these interviews were done four years ago, but they remain as important as ever – for nothing in the sports integrity world has changed – there is still rampant doping, there is still the luring in of young people to gambling addiction and the silent plague of physical and sexual abuse of athletes.

A Globe and Mail article, I wrote about the Canadian soccer drone scandal and the real problems in sports integrity.

Many Canadians were surprised to see Canada’s women’s soccer team plunged into scandal after being be caught using a drone to spy on a rival team. But sadly, it’s no surprise to find sports coaches and staff exhibiting unethical behaviour.

In the drone spying scandal, the soon-to-be-ex-national coach Bev Priestman declared, “This does not represent the values that our team stands for.”

Really? So when our team uses an expensive drone that somebody must have bought, someone must have been trained to use and someone must have figured out where the opposing team was – it was all an accident?

According to a superb investigation by Rick Westhead of TSN, the Canada’s mens and women’s national soccer teams have a long history of spying on opposition teams. The piece says Canada spied against New Zealand, Panama, Costa Rica, South Korea, Japan, Trinidad and the United States.

The whole time no one did anything. Junior staff were pressured into carrying out spying, which was considered part of the job.

Nothing changed because spying is very common in soccer.

One of the greatest coaches of the modern era is José Mourinho, now of the Turkish powerhouse Fenerbahçe. When he was at Chelsea, his assistant André Villas-Boas, also a famous coach, said to the English newspaper the Telegraph, he was sent to “travel to training grounds, often incognito, and look at our opponents’ mental and physical state before drawing my conclusions.”

Mr. Mourinho is not the only famous soccer manager to spy. Marcelo Bielsa is the coach of the Uruguayan national team. He is renown for his passionate monologues during press conferences bemoaning dreadful refereeing, poor training grounds and biased treatment against his team. But Mr. Bielsa spies on his opponents so often that he speaks openly of watching the training sessions of all their opponents before playing them.

Spying is hardly the worst offence by sports coaches and staff. While the pomp and misplaced ceremony of the Paris Olympics plays out, there is still rampant sexual, physical and mental abuse of athletes across sports, countries and cultures.

This abuse comes from one essential power dynamic. The coach controls the athlete’s gateway to immortality. Every sports person wants to perform and win at the very highest level. So many coaches and officials demand an awful price to allow them do so.

We have seen countless scandals, from junior hockey to the U.K. Premier League to Olympics gymnastics. A scapegoat is found and, if unlucky, punished publicly, but the system goes on.

This abuse in sports is so common that the triple Olympic gold medal winner Nancy Hogshead, who dedicated her career to cleaning up sports, says, “Not every coach is a pedophile, but every pedophile wants to be a coach.”

Its the flip side of all the glamour and glory that we see on our screens while the Olympics flashes past us. The dark side behind the glittering show.

Very few journalists speak about it. They love pretending that our young people are safe in the glamorous sports world, when the truth is often the opposite. So they write and speak about the beautiful people but do nothing to protect them.

The Olympics is also rife with doping. Ten years ago, the bravest couple in sports, Vitaly and Yuliya Stepanov, came forward with the results of their extraordinary investigation. They are the whistleblowers who exposed the dirty secrets of near-compulsory doping at the heart of both Russian and international sports.

Because of their work, the Russian team was banned from several Olympics and there were a number of mysterious deaths of other Russian anti-doping officials. Sports officials were convicted in a Paris criminal case of accepting millions of dollars in bribes to cover up positive doping tests while running a “mafia-like organization.”

Yet, last week, dozens on the Chinese swim team tested positive for doping while wining medals at the last Olympics. Many of these same athletes have returned to the Paris Games. The response of the Canadian based organization World Anti-Doping Agency? Speak at length and loudly about ethics but do nothing.

Meanwhile, the real stuff, the appalling, criminal, loathsome pushing of our young people into body harming doping, and sexual abuse by coaches and sports officials goes on almost completely unchecked.

Nothing has changed.