Only If You Get Caught

Patrick Redford interviews Dennis Young from Front Office Sports about the curious phenomenon of people cheating in marathons.  Episode transcript here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ckILetF2Ppwha1sA5MfLASLx6VkLCIRQSYQaMqmOau8/edit?usp=sharing 🏷️: marathon cheating, Rosie Ruiz, Boston Marathon, Kip Litton, Mike Rossi, Frank Meza, letsrun.com, Derek Murphy, Marathon Investigation, bib swappin...

Patrick Redford interviews Marcela Mora y Araujo about Diego Maradona's "Hand of God" goal in the 1986 world cup, and they discuss whether VAR has ruined sports.  Episode transcript here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17QpUdFURlE8IIevVh2mUOH_FYtZ3Uio8obv9wL1nz-g/edit?usp=sharing 🏷️: Diego Maradona, Hand of God, 1986 World Cup, Argentina vs England, VAR soccer, football cheating, FIFA World Cu...

Patrick Redford interviews Pablo Torre about how he broke the Kawhi Leonard salary cap story.  Episode transcript here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19MoFfJFGcFjA1spW6599r0HF0XH14ERuhSuO0__Sb3E/edit?usp=sharing 🏷️: Kawhi Leonard, Steve Ballmer, LA Clippers, NBA salary cap, Aspiration scandal, Pablo Torre, ESPN, Uncle Dennis Robertson, Joe Sandberg, greenwashing, sham contract, KL2 Aspire LLC...

Patrick Redford interviews Reeves Wiedeman about the bizarre case of Filippo Bernardini, the "Spine Collector" who stole thousands of unpublished books without ever leaking or selling them. With reporting from.  Episode transcript HERE 🏷️: book theft, publishing industry, Filippo Bernardini, The Spine Collector, unpublished manuscripts, phishing emails, identity theft, FBI investigation, Simon &am...

Patrick Redford interviews Jacob Silverman about the rise and fall of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried.  Episode transcript HERE 🏷️: Sam Bankman-Fried, SBF, FTX, FTX collapse, FTX scandal, FTX fraud, cryptocurrency, crypto scandal, crypto fraud, Sam Bankman-Fried documentary, Sam Bankman-Fried story, cryptocurrency fraud, crypto crash, crypto winter, Alameda Research, effective altruism, FTT token, Chang...

We are BACK with a new season! 

The Operation Varsity Blues scandal made more visible the extent to which higher education has become a pay-to-play game. In this episode, we speak with Kirsten Hextrum, an associate professor at Oregon State University and the author of Special Admission: How College Sports Recruitment Favors White Suburban Athletes.  Episode transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IjWMwEpZ_VEj76A8Tbl70BF...

The Connor Stalions story is the perfect cheating scandal through which to understand college football, the most cheating-ass corrupt sport we have. Stalions is an insane character and the stuff he did was as blatant and obvious as it gets. The question of whether or not he cheated is unambiguous, but what he did was, A) something that all of Michigan’s rivals were doing, B) a violation on a techn...

The simple story of the early-aughts baseball steroids scandal is that Congress caught a bunch of star players juicing. That’s mostly true, but that reading fails to properly place the scandal in the most relevant context: labor relations. You don’t get the steroid “crisis” without the 1994 strike, nor can you fully explain the insane public spectacle of congress making a show of criminalizing the...

The Las Vegas Aces and the New York Liberty have both had scandals around their owners paying or otherwise providing benefits to players under the table in an attempt to circumvent salary cap rules, right as women’s sports exploded in popularity. Maitreyi Anantharaman joins us to look at the state of the fight for wage equality in sports, and what the WNBA players are fighting for. Episode transcr...

What does cheating look like on a reality show where the goal is to find love? In this episode, Emma Gray and Claire Fallon from Love to See It join us to talk through the fiction of "for the right reasons" on The Bachelor franchise.  Episode transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GS4u1CpTtjs7hvdKroTnLZCLRNxd5etfg841_66Y1-8/edit?usp=sharing You can contribute to Radiotopia's fall fundrais...

Lance Armstrong's rise and fall in the cycling world paved the way for a mythology about the "natural body" to proliferate in sports. Today, it's being used to argue for bans of trans athletes. Reo Eveleth of Tested joins us to talk about the unintended consequences of the natural body myth.  Episode transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1It-9UQv2oX1CP5nYFPOTs6sXsLCRdiUVaD2UcZlqHcM/edit?u...

When chess exploded in popularity during the pandemic, it changed — and those changes brought about a new kind of player, and a very new kind of scandal. Joshua Robinson from the Wall Street Journal joins us for this story about cheating, the internet, and uh...receiving vibrating signals through a connected device that is not intended for chess.  Episode transcript h ere. You can contribute to Ra...

Sacramento Kings fans have long believed that the NBA fixed the 2002 Western Conference finals so the Lakers would win. Patrick is joined by Tommy Craggs to discuss whether they think it actually happened.  Episode transcript here .  Show Credits Only If You Get Caught is written and hosted, by Patrick Redford .  It’s produced by Alex Sujong Laughlin , with production support from Jae Towle Vieira...

Only If You Get Caught launches Oct 21!