Match-Fixing, the Oligarch and the Ivy League: Inside the Most Corrupt Sport at the Olympics
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Pablo Torre
4.7 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2024
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
We tumble down the rabbithole of the global match-fixing scandal that’s quietly tearing apart the U.S. Olympic fencing team, ahead of their trip to Paris this month. And we investigate how it all connects to a spiraling refereeing crisis that takes us from Harvard and Princeton to the very top of the International Olympic Committee — and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Where one of the world’s 100 richest people, Alisher Usmanov, has allegedly exported a culture of bribery and corruption that’s scared pretty much everybody in sabre fencing away from talking, on the record. Until now.
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Transcript
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| 0:25.2 | The Open University, the future is open. |
| 0:32.6 | Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. |
| 0:34.7 | I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. |
| 0:39.1 | How many, by percentage, would you say, referees right now are corrupted in saber fencing? |
| 0:49.7 | If you have, let's say you take the top 20 referees, about half. |
| 0:55.5 | Right after this ad. |
| 0:58.3 | You're listening to Draft King's Network. |
| 1:18.9 | Okay. Okay, so the first thing that I need you to know about this rabbit hole I'm about to dive into is that I did not give a f*** about saber fencing or any kind of fencing at all. |
| 1:26.7 | But one day recently, this was May 31st, |
| 1:29.6 | 2024 at 353 p.m. Eastern, I got a notification on my phone because somebody had tagged me in a |
| 1:37.8 | tweet. And this tweet from loyal PTFL listener at Jim Jimson Jr. demanded to know how I had not yet done a five-part series on a first-time Olympian I had never heard of before, a saber fencer named Mitchell Serran. |
| 1:56.6 | Mitchell Serran, who was about to represent the United States in Paris in now a couple weeks. |
| 2:02.9 | And while, again, I knew nothing about fencing, |
| 2:06.3 | what I immediately found out was that I specifically should have known about Mitchell Serran. |
| 2:12.9 | Because Mitchell Serran, it turns out, is a Harvard graduate who is also Filipino-American |
| 2:18.6 | and was also born in the New York, New Jersey area, and the dude loves Star Wars. |
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