In 2000, Spain took the world by surprise, racking up a total of 107 medals in that year's Summer Paralympic Games in Sydney. It was their best performance ever and the whole country was beyond ecstatic. In fact, the entire world was rooting for them. The spirit of the Paralympics had never been completely about winning. It was always about constantly moving forward in the face of adversity.

It was about inspiring the world, and it seemed like these Spanish athletes were perfectly representing that their men's intellectual disability best team was especially dominating in their championship finals game. Spain comfortably cruised by Russia, winning by almost a 20 point margin. It wasn't even close. The Spanish basketball players were so good, it almost seemed like they weren't disabled at all, which was simply remarkable for what no one could have ever anticipated was that these athletes truly weren't disabled and they would end up as one of the biggest, most unethical scandals in sports history.

Welcome back, guys. My name is Andy Chang and this is Hidden Stories. When the Paralympic Games were first started in 1968, intellectually disabled athletes weren't included. It wasn't until eight years later when the Special Olympics were created in 90, 68, that these intellectually disabled athletes were finally allowed to compete in their own games. But still, they were never allowed to participate in the actual Paralympics.

Since intellectual disabilities are invisible, making them much harder to confirm and classify compared to athletes in wheelchairs, for example. In 1996, however, the International Paralympic Committee finally decided to add intellectual impairment as a category in the Paralympics alongside the physical impairment category. For the first time ever, mentally challenged athletes from all around the world could actually represent their countries and have a shot at winning a medal in the Paralympics.

At the time, though, pretty much the only way that the International Paralympic Committee verified that athletes actually had intellectual disabilities was by reviewing their medical information. As long as someone had a note from a doctor or other medical specialist saying that they were intellectually impaired, they would be good to compete. In hindsight, it seems almost inevitable that someone would try to cheat the system, since it would just be so ridiculously easy to do so.

But back then, maybe people were simply unwilling to believe that anyone would be so evil as to try and fake it. This ability to win the Paralympics. I mean to intentionally cheat hundreds of the nicest, hardest working disabled athletes around the world who would have the heart to do that? Well, as it turns out, this guy, his name is Fernando Martinez Vicente.

And at the time, he was the president of the Spanish Federation of Sports People with Intellectual Disabilities, or Betty and the vice president of the Spanish Paralympic Committee. Now, when you're the head of an organization like Fedor, you pretty much the only way that you can ensure government funding for yourself and your athletes to get things done is by winning medals.

Basically, the more you win, the more incentive the government has to grant you money. Since your organization already has a track record of success. So it was Fernando's job and main priority to win as much as he could. And although for the most part, the Spanish Paralympic teams were already very solid when it came to men's intellectual disability basketball, they were just downright terrible.

Says the team was very new. The players were really untrained and they had no chemistry with one another. Even after Fernando tried hiring new coaches, implementing new workouts and training schedules and scouting out new players, the team still wasn't very good. It seemed like nothing was working, and they were still losing pretty much every single, small, local and regional competition that they attended.

So one day, feeling extremely frustrated, Fernando suddenly had an idea What if he could give his team an advantage that made them almost guaranteed to win? What if he had a team that wasn't actually disabled? Fernando knew that morally it was completely wrong. However, he was able to rationalize the decision by reminding himself that the government grants that he would receive from when he would be going straight to helping the actually disabled Spanish athletes under his organization.

Yes, Fernando would get to pay himself a greater salary as well. But in his eyes, everyone would benefit. And once the idea of cheating, the Paralympics had firmly planted itself in his mind, there was no going back. Over the course of the next few weeks and months, despite the fact that Fernando had a disabled daughter himself, he began to secretly start recruiting non-disabled basketball players to join his intellectually disabled Paralympic team with the promise of a free trip to Australia and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in sponsorship money.

He was easily able to convince people to join the team, especially when he informed them that having non-disabled players on Paralympic teams was actually normal. Fernando lied to many of these players informing them that this was something that every team did to improve their performance and that they would only be helping support the actual disabled Spanish athletes. And since the legislation around the Paralympic Games and its rules was so ambiguous, most people just blindly accepted where Fernando was saying as the truth.

They had no reason to not believe him. Now, from a logical standpoint, all Fernando needed to do to make his team overpowered was to hire two, maybe three non-disabled basketball players. Max. For some reason, though, he ended up recruiting ten. Among these ten, five were allegedly semiprofessional basketball players, and two were college point guards. In the end, only two players on Spain's intellectually disabled baseball team were actually intellectually disabled.

But since Fernando was able to have everyone's medical forms forged, no one suspected a thing. The only other medical tests that the players were asked to do was a blood pressure check and also some push ups. And then they were cleared to compete in the 2000 summer Paralympics and said even from the very first game, it was clear that the Spanish basketball team was guaranteed to win the gold.

They were just that good. In fact, they were too good. By halftime, Spain was already up by more than 30 points against China. They were dominating. So hard that the Spanish coach actually had to sit the team down and encourage them to slow down a bit and to let the other teams score more. Allegedly saying Let's move down a gear or they'll figure out you're not disabled.

But even when they did move down a gear, it didn't make a difference. The Chinese players were still completely unable to compete with the Spanish players over the course of the next week. Spain exhibited that same dominant performance against every single team that they faced. No one even stood a chance against them. I mean, how could they? These were all sub 75 IQ intellect, fully disabled players going against non-disabled players who were more skilled and had been playing for longer than they had.

What's even more disgusting is that each night the Spanish basketball players and coaches would all allegedly go celebrate by partying at local nightclubs in Australia, but would leave the two actually disabled players on their team behind at the hotel, even though some of the non-disabled Spanish players might not have known what they were doing was wrong when they first signed up for the team.

They had to have known by the time the games were over and it's soon after Spain beat Russia 8763 in the finals match and took home the gold for basketball. Although their country back home rejoiced and excitedly celebrated their victory, the players themselves just felt empty inside. None of them really celebrated even after receiving their gold medals. In a later interview, one player said that everyone kind of knew that the whole thing was a farce.

We stood there and listened, but it was a false medal. It was a false national anthem. Nobody really wanted to talk about it afterwards. Throughout the past week, it had become apparent to many of the non-disabled Spanish players that they were not supposed to be there at all. The coaches kept telling them to act stupid, which made them incredibly uncomfortable and frustrated.

Although Fernando's plan had succeeded in sponsorship deals as well as government grants were started to come in for the players and for Fetty. Most of the players felt no joy or satisfaction at all in having cheated the Paralympic Games. But although they were unhappy, none of them expected just how quickly they would be exposed. Almost immediately after photos of the Spanish Paralympic Barthel team receiving their gold medals were posted online, people began commenting on them, saying that they recognized this player or that player and that they weren't actually disabled.

As these photos kept getting shared and published in more newspapers, these non-disabled players begin to get recognized more and more often as frauds and as people could fake their disabilities. This got to the point where Fernando and other fellow officials begin advising the non-disabled players to wear sunglasses and hands in public and also to grow beards for themselves so that they wouldn't be recognized.

But as it turns out, none of this would make a difference. Shortly after the end of the 2000 Paralympic Games, one of the non-disabled Spanish basketball players, a man named Carlos Rybak Warda, came out as a whistleblower and exposed everything. As it turns out, Carlos was apparently an undercover investigative journalist, and over the past two years that he had been working with the Spanish Paralympic team.

He had apparently been patiently biding his time, secretly waiting for the right moment to reveal all of the crime that Fernando and Freddie had been committing. After Carlos, his article was finally published on the truth behind the Spanish Paralympic baseball team, it quickly went viral. People everywhere were obviously furious. They felt disgusted and betrayed that anyone could ever stoop to such a love.

Within just two months, the Spanish Paralympic baseball team had been officially disqualified from the competition and was ordered to return all of the gold medals that they had received. The fallout was so bad that the International Paralympic Committee eventually decided to indefinitely suspend any Paralympic event that involved intellectual disabilities. All of a sudden, intellectually disabled athletes all around the world had their dreams ripped away from them in an instant.

Athletes who have been painstakingly training every single day, devoting their lives just to be able to compete in the Paralympics one day, suddenly, no longer had any hope of being able to do so. It was a devastating blow. Following Carlos was exposed to a lengthy court case soon began to investigate Fernando and Fed more carefully and to determine punishments for them and for the players.

Now, some people actually believe that Carlos himself was a fraud. They claim that the only reason he decided to say that he was a journalist and decided to blow the whistle on the whole thing was that he already knew they were going to get caught. So he just wanted to pretend like he had been a good guy all along and was the one who had exposed everything.

These people believed that Carlos had been on the team originally to make money like all of the other players. But the moment people started getting suspicious about the photos, he decided to out everyone else to save himself. There really are many facts that don't make sense, like why Carlos had waited so long to share the information he had gathered, or why he hadn't ever documented anything, such as recording any conversations or taking any photos.

It also seems highly suspicious that Carlos had been working with the Spanish Paralympic team for two years and had never said anything before. But regardless, in his exposé, Carlos identified Fernando Martinez Vicente as the mastermind behind the entire scheme and the man responsible for everything. At first, Fernando denied these accusations, insisting that it could not possibly happen. When asked the comments about Carlos, he also stated A person who has been on the basketball team for two years, who has played friendlies, has participated and won the Iberian Cup and then goes to Sydney and two days later says that he is not disabled if he was not disabled before.

Now he is. If someone does something like this, they are recognized as disabled. But after a while, Fernando finally confessed to orchestrating the whole plot to have non-disabled players on his Paralympic team to try and acquire more sponsorships and funding. Incredibly, it was revealed that over the past few years, Fernando had already managed to embezzle millions of dollars that he had received from the Spanish government, although he was supposed to have funneled most of this money back into Ferro and the Spanish Paralympic athletes.

He had instead kept most of it for himself, using it to buy three luxurious homes, a sports club, eight cars, five wineries and a yacht. Despite the fact that Fernando had managed to convince himself that everything illegal and immoral that he had been doing was for a good cause because some of the money was still going back to the disabled athletes.

This turned out to be completely illogical, since almost all of it was being used to fund his luxurious lifestyle. After more than a decade of investigating and court trials, Fernando was finally found guilty of fraud and forgery. But although the prosecution was asking for two years in prison, Fernando only ended up receiving a small fine of 50 €400, and he was also asked to return €150,000 worth of the sponsorship money that he had received.

Basically just a slap on the wrist. As for the ten figure disabled Spanish athletes, they were allowed to go free without any charges. In the end, both of the actually disabled members of the 2000 Spanish Paralympic basketball team, Ramon Torres and Juan Pareja, suffered from depression and other psychological consequences as a result of their experience. To this day, they still don't fully understand why they had their gold medals taken away from them or what really happened with their teammates.

In 2012, more than a decade after all of the events related to intellectual disabilities were removed from the Paralympic, the International Paralympic Committee finally decided to reinstate them. These events are still in place to this day and involve a much more rigorous examination and testing process that makes faking an intellectual disability now almost impossible. While the 2000 cheating scandal was a very dark time in Paralympic history, we can rest assured knowing that steps have been taken to make sure that something like this will never happen again.

Take care, guys, and I'll see you all next week.