The Fake Paralympians: 3. Lost
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 31 August 2021
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The cheating is now out in the open and the players - including genuinely-disabled captain Ray - have to hand back their gold medals. But how and when did the cheating start? An ex-coach of the team, who was in charge until just two years before the scandal, says he began to suspect something was wrong way before Sydney 2000. Plus Dan tries to find an answer to one of the biggest questions of all - why did the cheats do it?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Dan Pepper, I'm an ex-Par Olympic swimmer from the northwest of England. |
| 0:07.0 | At the prime of my swimming career, as a world champion in multiple events |
| 0:14.4 | but this coincided with the total ban on my category at the Paralympics. I have an |
| 0:21.3 | intellectual disability. |
| 0:25.0 | Athletes like me were excluded from Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008, |
| 0:31.0 | after a massive cheating scandal at Sydney 2000. |
| 0:37.7 | So I missed out on my best chance to win a Paralympic Medal. |
| 0:42.2 | It's fair to say that the scandal ruined my swimming career. |
| 0:47.0 | Even at the Tokyo Games that aren't as many medals in my category, as there were 21 years ago. In the fake Paralympians I'm |
| 0:56.9 | finding out exactly what happened and why it left sorts of devastating legacy for learning disability sport. |
| 1:05.0 | Previously, the outcome of our investigation was that out of the 12 athletes of the basketball team, only two had an official |
| 1:18.5 | certificate that they had an intellectual disability the other 10 were people without any |
| 1:26.7 | disability they was taking the gold medal for the people I didn't really want to |
| 1:32.2 | hear that I got this gold medal and knew he's going to take it away from me |
| 1:37.1 | From the BBC World Service this is the fake Paralympians |
| 1:42.3 | Episode 3, Lost. |
| 1:45.0 | My heart was broken in pieces and I'm still looking for it. |
| 1:55.0 | I'm chatting with Ramon Torres or Ray to his friends and his sister Rose. |
| 2:07.0 | Ray was the captain of Spain's intellectual disability basketball team of the Sydney |
| 2:12.0 | 2,000 Paralymp Olympic Games who won gold. |
| 2:17.6 | And this might be very hard, but from my point of view it would be extremely hard. |
| 2:24.0 | So if you can try and express like what happened to your medal and what did you do with it? |
... |
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