Spain’s Paralympic basketball team won the gold medal at Sydney 2000 – but it later emerged that 10 of the team’s 12 players weren’t actually disabled.
The former head of Spain’s governing body of sports for athletes with intellectual disabilities has denied knowing anything about an elaborate scheme which led to able-bodied basketball players winning a Paralympic title – eight years after he took full legal responsibility for the scandal.
Although the Spanish basketball team won the gold medal match at Sydney 2000 against their Russian counterparts, it soon became clear that there was something more.
Shortly after the win, a journalist discovered that only two of the 12 members of the team actually had intellectual disabilities. The scheme led to 19 people being charged with the fraud.
Fernando Martín Vicente, the president of Spain’s Sports Federation for People with Intellectual Disabilities (Feddi), was also among those subject to criminal charges.
However, in his first public statement since those legal proceedings, Vicente has denied having any involvement in the plot and labeled the accusations against him as “absurd and unfounded”.
“How was it done? Who encouraged it? What doctors or professionals lent themselves to such a thing? Sincerely, I don’t know,” he wrote in a letter to the BBC.
The former vice-president for the Spanish Paralympic Committee, Ellie Simmonds, also mentioned his achievements in the sport of people with learning disabilities as well as his own daughter’s diagnosis of having an intellectual disability.
But the secretary-general of the Spanish Paralympic Committee Miguel Sagarra has said it is “100% impossible that something of this relevance would have taken place without his knowledge”.
Many were affected by the scandal, which led to an outright ban on athletes with intellectual disabilities being able to participate in the next two Paralympic Games.
One of those most directly affected was Ramón Torres, the captain of that Spanish team at Sydney 2000 who was one of the two players who did have a genuine disability. His gold medal was returned to him after it became clear that his teammates were not disabled.
After questioning the members of the team that did not appear disabled, he was told by the hierarchy that there was no problem. Torres was angry at Vicente’s repeated denials of any knowledge about the fraud.
“Fernando Martín says now he doesn’t know anything about it – he can’t do that,” Torres said. “Of course he knew all about it. I thought he was a bigger man. He committed an error. He should apologize and say “I am sorry”; I would be very pleased.”