As the starter’s blast echoed through the cobblestone streets of Maniago, Italy, in May, Charles Moreau and his fellow World Cup competitors in hand-cycling surged forward. Then, less than 100 metres into the race, Moreau and 50 other cyclists suddenly stopped to protest a system they say enables cheating
Paris Paralympics: As Games get bigger, some athletes say cheating is more prevalent
By Roman Stubbs, Matt Higgins
Washington Post·
21 mins to read
A competitor enters the pool deck for Para Swimming ahead of the Paris 2024 Summer Paralympic Games at Paris La Defense Arena on August 27. Photo / Getty
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Amid such growth, athletes say the system that is intended to ensure equitable competition is easily manipulated and that the governing bodies charged with oversight are more concerned with silencing allegations against competitors to preserve the inspirational themes of the Paralympics than they are with safeguarding fair play.
The Paralympics employ what’s called a classification system to put athletes into competition with others who have similar impairments. Each sport has its own criteria and classes. Whereas at the Olympics, the 100-metre dash in track and field will feature one class each for men and women, the Paralympics’ version of that event will consist of 16 classes for men and 13 for women to account for varying disabilities. Although some disabilities may result in clear-cut assignments to a class, others may be more ambiguous and rely on the judgement of medical classifiers and the integrity of competitors to place them in the proper field.
The post spoke to more than a dozen athletes across the Paralympics movement – from sports as diverse as cross-country skiing, wheelchair rugby, track and field, snowboarding, cycling, swimming, kayaking, wheelchair basketball and downhill skiing. They point out the International Paralympic Committee and the sport governing bodies under its mandate provide inadequate mechanisms for the redress of grievances, leaving few methods to challenge suspected unfair classification.
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Oksana Masters, a double leg amputee with impairment in all four limbs who will compete in Paris for the United States in hand-cycling, a sport in which she has won two Paralympic gold medals, said viewers “see the Paralympics as not as competitive, and it’s all inspirational. ‘Oh, look, they’re hugging each other at the finish line.’ If they knew how cut-throat and what’s going on behind closed doors, they’d be so shocked.”
Masters, who has competed in cross-country skiing and biathlon disciplines and is the most decorated US Paralympian in history at the Winter Games, said that such mythology contributes to why national federations or the IPC refuse to take up athletes’ complaints around so-called “classification doping”, which involves dishonesty instead of drugs.
“This event is here to inspire so many people in society,” Masters said of the prevailing attitude. “The fact that there’s people with a disability at an inspirational event, and all of a sudden there’s now cheating? They’re doing things illegally? The image of Paralympics is broken then.”
Some athletes who publicly raise allegations say they’re often met with rebukes rather than satisfaction.
Moreau, 42, who is paraplegic as a result of a car crash, has won two bronze medals while competing for Canada at two Paralympics in the H3 class, in which competitors ride an adapted recumbent three-wheel bike and pedal with their hands. He first protested at a race in 2019 without repercussions, but after Maniago, officials with the international governing body for cycling (UCI) docked him and four other riders representing Spain, Italy and Norway 25 points from the world rankings and fined each 200 Swiss Francs (equivalent to approximately $380) for violating rules concerning “intimidation and improper conduct directed at another rider”.
“The only thing we could do to be seen and heard about our disagreement was something like that, something that would bring attention to the crowd that was there, and tell the UCI because we don’t have anything to do through the official channels,” said Moreau, who will compete in Paris.
An issue, but how widespread?
Those involved in classification say instances of misrepresentation are not as common as athletes suspect. Kevin Kopera is a physician in Greenville, South Carolina, and the chief classifier for UCI.
“An athlete’s dominant performance in paracycling does not necessarily indicate that they are in the wrong sport class,” Kopera wrote in an email. “The pool of athletes for the handcycling H3 class are thoracic spinal cord injuries, which represent a fraction of the population. This leads to outliers when you have a true Olympic-level athlete amongst very good athletes. Imagine your high school football team having a future NFL player – they will be a man among boys.”
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Classifiers such as Kopera are all volunteers and typically have a background in medicine or physical therapy. During the classification process, athletes submit a form from their doctor testifying to their underlying health condition. They then are subjected to additional stages involving a physical examination known as a “bench test” to assess the extent of their impairment, after which they are assigned a classification, followed by a review of their performance in competition to ensure they are in the correct class.
Medical histories and the exams are private health records and not available for review or scrutiny. To document suspected cheating, athletes have become self-styled investigators, using their phones to film rivals, gathering open-source intelligence on the internet and sleuthing social media accounts for evidence that competitors are capable of more than their classification would indicate. Such evidence is seldom admissible, however.
“I don’t believe anyone can say to what degree misrepresentation exists in parasports,” Kopera said. “Any statement in this regard would be speculative. Certainly, to say it doesn’t exist would not be realistic. The stakes are too high.”
Through the years, there have been glimpses of what some athletes are willing to do for a Paralympic medal.
The most infamous Paralympic cheating scandal came at the 2000 Sydney Games, where Spain’s intellectual disability men’s basketball team won the gold medal despite fielding a roster with 10 players who did not have disabilities. The scandal led to a total ban on athletes with an intellectual disability during the 2004 and 2008 Paralympics.
The Games have contended with other scandals, including during the Tokyo Games in 2021, when Indian track athlete Vinod Kumar was stripped of his bronze medal in discus after officials determined he intentionally misrepresented his disability during classification. Kumar was suspended from competition for two years.
Other controversies have occurred after alleged errors by classifiers: On the eve of the 2008 Beijing Games, a British teenage track athlete, Rebecca Chin, was reclassified to compete with athletes with cerebral palsy. Chin, who was born with hyperlax ankle ligaments, was later stripped of a silver medal in the shot put competition after organisers determined that she had been placed in the wrong division.
“It has to be better if you expect us to be the best and to grow the Paralympic movement, which is what we do, right?” Jessica Long, who has competed at five Paralympics in swimming for the United States and won 29 medals, including 16 gold, said about irregularities around classification. “There’s so many incredible people who are growing the Paralympic movement, which is giving it more recognition. But then we have to make the system better.”
As the global audience for the Paralympic Games has doubled during the past decade – the event sells the third-most tickets of any sports competition in the world after the Olympics and football’s World Cup – the growth has spawned a record US$1.25 billion (NZ$2b) in advertising revenue around the Paris Olympics and Paralympics for NBCUniversal, the broadcast rights-holder for the Games in the United States. Meanwhile, the total economic impact of adapted and para-sport-related events in the United States has grown to US$140 million annually, according to a study by All In Sport Consulting.
As opportunities for athletes to earn financial support and bonuses from national federations (US$37,500 for a gold medal by a US athlete) for competition results have increased and lucrative sponsorships potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars beckon, those at the top have come to depend on the sport for their livelihood.
The IPC sought to improve its classification system and undertook a three-year review that resulted in an overhaul of its rules. Ratified at the IPC’s general assembly last May, the new rules governing classification do not take effect until the lead-up to the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles.
Athletes say the timeline is too slow and worry some results from the Paris Games and 2026 Winter Games in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, will be tainted.
Brandon Lyons, 34, who is paraplegic, participated in the protest in the H3 class in Maniago and will compete for the United States in Paris. A competitor since 2017, he said classification doping seemed to spike in the year leading to the Tokyo Paralympics, held in 2021, and again in the run-up to Paris.
“Right before Tokyo, I remember hearing that there was going to be a long review of the classification process,” Lyons said. “Then fast-forward over the last three years, that has not changed and it seems like it has only gotten worse and it’s kind of turned into, like, the wild, wild west.”
Allegations and repercussions
Masters had considered not competing at the 2022 Paralympics because of concerns surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, eight days before the start of the Games. Born in Ukraine, Masters attributes her disabilities to birth defects from exposure to radiation resulting from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986. She spent the first seven years of her life in Ukrainian orphanages before she was adopted by an American woman, Gay Masters, and moved to the US, where she acquired citizenship.
In the first days of the Russian invasion, as bitter fighting roiled the outskirts of Kyiv, Masters arrived in Beijing. She said she felt singled out for her Ukrainian ancestry in China, a Russian ally.
“I had to say all the politically correct things,” she said. “On top of everything, it’s heightened because of Ukraine.”
Masters also had to manage the stress of competing in cross-country skiing and biathlon, two sports in which she was a favourite to win multiple gold medals in the LW12 class for the highest-functioning sit-skiers.
Masters and other leading athletes soon were surprised, and suspicious, at the performances of Chinese competitors. China began competing at the Winter Paralympics in 2002 but did not win a single medal until the 2018 PyeongChang Games, where China won only one – a gold in wheelchair curling. Four years later in Beijing, China led the medal count with 61, including 18 gold medals.
Mike Schultz is a US Paralympic snowboarding champion who competed on the snowboarding World Cup circuit in the year before Beijing and did not encounter a single Chinese competitor. They were permitted to earn qualifying points at separate events.
In Beijing, China won 10 medals in snowboarding – three gold, three silver and four bronze.
“We didn’t see them for a whole year, and then we get to China and they are truly a competitive force in all the sports,” Schultz said.
Julie Dussliere, chief of Paralympics at the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said she was not surprised by China’s rise. She cited advantages, from access to the competition venues before the Games, to training challenges for other countries resulting from the coronavirus pandemic to China’s motivation to perform well on its home soil.
“So it’s surprising but not surprising in the sense that we’ve watched China’s success in the summer side of the Paralympic movement for almost two decades now,” Dussliere said. “It was a foregone conclusion that they were going to succeed at winter sport as well.”
There are five classifications in sit-skiing: from most to least impaired, 10, 10.5, 11, 11.5 and 12. Skiers race on the course at the same time in a staggered start with the 10s going first, and finishing times are calculated according to a formula that factors in classification and the aggregate of the previous finishing times of the competitive field.
During the women’s sprint, an event in which she won gold four years earlier, Masters trailed a Chinese competitor classified as LW10, the most impaired category, whom she suspected of classification doping.
After settling for a silver medal, Masters tried to be diplomatic when talking with the media, but her frustration was building in private with teammates and coaches.
Masters’ final individual event of the Games was the women’s middle-distance March 12, and on the course, she again trailed the Chinese leader, who at a World Cup event three months earlier had finished 11th in the same race.
Midrace, Masters spotted the coach of the Chinese team, Roman Petushkov, a former biathlon competitor who won six gold medals for Russia at the 2014 Paralympic Games in Sochi, a competition later condemned for a systematic state-sponsored doping scheme.
“I saw him and I looked at him and I said a swear word,” Masters said of Petushkov. “I said: ‘F***ing cheaters! You’re doping. China is doping. Everyone here is misclassified.’ I said it more than once throughout the course. I said it a couple of times. I said: ‘This is all rigged and fake. This is not an equal Games whatsoever’.”
At finishing second behind the same competitor yet again, Masters was wrapped in a hug by Aaron Pike, who was competing for the US in biathlon and cross-country and with whom she has been in a relationship since the two began training together in advance of the 2014 Games.
Pike held her head to his chest. “I was giving her a hug just to console her, but then I was trying to get her to pipe down, jokingly telling her to shut up,” he said, noting the presence of media within earshot. “She was talking, and I was just doing what I could to try to keep her out of trouble, honestly.”
Word of Masters’s comments soon spread among athletes, and beyond.
“It was heartbreaking,” said Schultz, who won a silver medal in Beijing in snowboard cross. “She wore her emotions on her sleeve and rightfully so to a certain extent because it was like she got cheated by somebody who was taking advantage of the system.”
Hours after her on-course outburst, Masters said, she received a call from Eileen Carey, the US Nordic ski coach. Carey declined to comment through a spokesperson for the USOPC, but Masters said she was told that her accusations had been picked up on a hot mic along the course. She said USOPC officials told her: “There’s been intel and information that we need to get you out.”
Masters and Pike said Carey told each of them that US officials had arranged for them to depart China early, on a plane scheduled for the following day, the final day of competition at the Games, featuring the cross-country mixed 4x2.5-kilometre relay, in which the US stood a strong chance of winning gold with Masters racing as the first leg.
On March 12, the night before the relay, Masters said, USOPC staff presented her with the draft of a letter apologising to the IPC and the World Para Nordic Skiing Jury, an arm of the governing body for cross-country skiing at the Games. She said she feared if she didn’t sign the letter, she would lose her silver medal from the women’s 10km race earlier in the day, during which she lashed out at the Chinese team. The IPC denied Masters’s medal was ever in jeopardy.
Masters said she signed off on the apology.
With Masters competing as the first leg, the US won the relay for gold, finishing ahead of the Chinese team, which won silver. After the podium ceremony, Masters and Pike said, they returned briefly to the Athletes Village and were whisked to the airport with a US delegation that included Dussliere, the US Paralympics chief, who declined to discuss the incident on the record.
“I think we have unique situations at every Games where there are things going on behind the scenes with Team USA,” Dussliere said. “And our priority is always making sure athletes are well taken care of, able to perform their best on the field of play.
“We always say we want to get everybody in safely. We want to get them home safely. And that’s the priority. So I wouldn’t say this was abnormal.”
According to Masters and Pike, US personnel instructed Masters not to speak out as she proceeded through passport control.
Masters and Pike said after he and a few members of the US delegation proceeded through without delay, an officer asked Masters why her passport read Ukraine when she was an American athlete. They said she waited for what felt like five minutes before the officer called over a colleague for a discussion. Another 10 minutes passed, Masters said before officers made a phone call.
“I’ve never been more terrified in my life,” Masters said.
After approximately 15 minutes, she was released without explanation and boarded a flight for Japan, where she parted with the rest of the US delegation, and she and Pike caught a connecting flight home to the US.
It was the end of Masters’s ordeal in China, where she had won three gold medals and four silver medals in cross-country and biathlon. To her surprise, it was also the end of discussions with USOPC officials around classification doping.
“I was under the impression that we would have continued further conversations about it,” she said about USOPC officials and members of the US delegation who said they would raise the issue on her behalf.
Two years later, Masters said, nothing has happened.
Seeking recourse
In 2023, David Berling, a US paracyclist who had been competing in international competition for nearly a decade, filed a lawsuit against the IPC, claiming the organisation is illegally prohibiting athletes from any recourse for classification decisions they believe are creating an uneven playing field.
Berling’s case is being tried in Germany – the IPC is based in Bonn – and argues the IPC acts as a monopoly, in violation of German and European antitrust laws. Berling is not suing for damages; he said the lawsuit aims to create a mechanism for athletes to challenge the classification of their competitors.
Berling’s legs were amputated above the knee in 2007 after he was injured in a plane crash while serving in the US Air Force. The Department of Veterans Affairs gave him a handcycle – which has three wheels and required Berling to pedal with his hands – and by 2015, long neighbourhood rides turned into a competitive outlet. Berling started placing in international events and eventually qualified for the US national team, making it his goal to compete in the Paralympics.
But Berling couldn’t crack the upper tier of his division. By 2018, he wondered how some single-amputee athletes with function in both knees were allowed to participate in his class, and he started to grow suspicious of several riders who would walk up and down steep podiums after races – either on their own power or after someone handed them a lower-leg prosthetic. On social media, he watched videos of competitors in his own division participate in skiing and snowboarding.
“As a double above-the-knee amputee, I just can’t do that,” he said. “You can’t even fathom how bad the cheating and misrepresentation of disabilities are.”
Berling also found how limited his options were to file a formal complaint in his sport. He pleaded for UCI to look into the matter in a July 2022 email.
“Thank you for your message. It is the UCI policy however to limit direct communication with athletes,” wrote UCI paracycling co-ordinator Todd Fraser, who suggested Berling take it up with his national federation.
When Berling went to Ian Lawless, the US Paracycling director, he said Lawless opted to not investigate the matter. Lawless declined to comment for this story and referred questions to the USOPC.
Berling emailed the IPC’s head classifier, Tea Cisic, asking for help. Cisic never responded, according to Berling, who felt he had no other option but to seek legal action. Cisic did not respond to a request for comment.
Berling scraped together thousands of dollars out of his own pocket and started a GoFundMe to retain German lawyer Christof Wieschemann, who had helped US Paralympic snowboarder Brenna Huckaby win a court ruling against the IPC to reclassify and compete in the 2022 Winter Olympics.
In a July hearing, according to Wieschemann, lawyers for the IPC accused Berling of trying to “prevent the Games and they feared that it would be impossible to conduct it”.
“I would not gain an advantage for my clients, either for David or the others, to make the Paralympic Games impossible,” Wieschemann said in an interview. “That is not my goal. We only want it to be fair.”
The court ruling date is set for the middle of September, about a week after the conclusion of the Paris Games. Some athletes are eagerly awaiting the decision. Wieschemann said he was approached last year by five other Paralympic athletes from European countries – including Romania, Germany, Austria and Switzerland – to potentially pursue litigation against the IPC on similar grounds but were advised by Wieschemann to await the ruling in Berling’s case.
The controversy has helped drive others from their sport. Walter Ablinger, an Austrian cyclist who had medalled in three consecutive Paralympics in London, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, had planned to end his decorated career during the Paris Games. But he walked away from the sport earlier this year, in part because misclassification issues in the same H3 division as Moreau and Lyons “encouraged me to retire.” He had observed classification issues for nearly six years, he said, but even as one of the top cyclists in his sport felt he had limited options to voice criticism of the system.
“Since the classifications became unfair, the podium has been limited to the same athletes. The balance has been taken away from us,” Ablinger said in an email. “Getting to the top with ‘classification doping’ seems just as wrong to me as cheating with banned substances. The problem is also that such cases destroy the livelihoods of many honest sports colleagues in their own country.”
Berling said he also quietly retired this summer. He estimates he has lost tens of thousands of dollars in potential race winnings, sponsorships and benefits because of misclassified athletes who dominate his division. He’s unsure whether he will ever race competitively again, but he hopes his lawsuit will spark change in the system.
Recently there have been signals that governing bodies and the IPC are at least open to change.
In 2022, FIS took over governing cross-country skiing from the IPC, along with other snow sports, para Alpine skiing and para snowboarding. FIS provides a hotline for athletes in all three sports to report complaints around classification to an independent body. And UCI plans to roll out changes to its classifications after the Paris Games, according to Kopera.
Athletes say they know classification can be complicated and nuanced and they are not seeking perfection. They just want a voice when it comes to improving the process.
“You don’t want to open up this big complaint box that everyone’s now just going to start complaining because they’re not winning, right?” Lyons said. “Or wanting to go after someone for retaliation. But there’s got to be some type of system, where, even if it’s anonymous, to be like: ‘Hey, this is evidence that I have on social media. This should be questioned.’”
Still, many athletes cite social taboos around criticising people with disabilities as an obstacle to real change.
“I’m just really frustrated because we’re so afraid to call people out almost in that disabled space, where it’s like, ‘No, you can’t ask me those types of questions,’” Long said. “But I think we need to take it up a notch.”
