[TV static drones]
[bright tone]
[upbeat rock music]
*
[cheers and applause]
- Welcome, welcome, welcome to "Last Week Tonight!"
I'm John Oliver.
Thank you so much for joining us,
and let us begin straightaway
with the United Kingdom,
a place whose very name after this week's events
is beginning to sound a bit sarcastic,
because the UK this week
voted to leave the European Union,
a decision that has shaken the world,
and not in a "Muhammad Ali beating
Sonny Liston" kind of way.
More in a "those IKEA meatballs you love
contain horse" kind of way.
And--and the fallout in Britain has been swift and significant.
- The Brexit decision is off to a bit of a rough start,
here in London, at least.
Stocks were in free fall,
the pound historically weak,
and the country's in the market for a new prime minister.
- That's right. David Cameron announced
he will be stepping down in the wake of the vote,
which should make me happy,
but in this situation, it doesn't.
It's like catching an ice cream cone out of the air
because a child was hit by a car.
I mean, I'll eat it.
I'll--I'll eat it, but it--it's tainted somehow.
And--and before-- before you have any sympathy
for David Cameron, you should know this whole vote
was his idea in the first place.
- We will give the British people a referendum
with a very simple in-or-out choice.
- Yes, Cameron proposed the in-or-out choice himself,
which he normally only does when
he's deciding whether to fuck a pig's mouth.
And meanwhile-- meanwhile,
the Brexit vote has boosted its two most vocal backers:
Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party
and three-time cover model for "Punchable Face" magazine,
and Boris Johnson,
a shaved orangutan with Owen Wilson's hair.
And, before and after the vote,
both men drove home a common theme.
- I believe that this Thursday
could be our country's Independence Day.
- Let June the 23rd go down
in our history as our Independence Day!
[cheering]
- Okay.
Just a couple of things there.
First, Britain was already independent.
In fact, it's what many other countries celebrate
their independence from.
And-- and second--
second, the sequel-- the sequel to the movie
they're quoting actually opened this week
and features the wholesale destruction of London,
which is beginning to feel
pretty fucking appropriate right now.
And I'm not even sure the pro-Brexit camp
had planned on winning, because the next day,
they started speaking a lot more carefully
about the promises that have been made.
You might remember that campaign bus,
which read, "We send the EU £350 million a week.
Let's fund our National Health Service instead."
Well, here's Nigel Farage the morning after the vote.
- The £350 million a week we send to the EU--
which we will no longer send to the EU--
can you guarantee that's gonna go to the NHS?
- No, I can't, and I-I would never have made that claim.
That was one of the mistakes I think the--
the Leave campaign made.
- Oh, now you're telling us!
But it does seem that Farage will not correct
factual mistakes when they're on the side of buses.
I, therefore, would encourage Britain to take out bus ads
reading "Nigel Farage has spent hours trying to put
his own penis in his asshole."
I presume he'll be silent about it.
And while the benefits
of the Brexit may well have been exaggerated,
the downsides could be all too real.
Prominent figures in Scotland and Northern Ireland
are advocating for leaving the UK
and rejoining the EU.
Meanwhile, the EU is understandably worried
about other member nations making exits of their own,
so it may well negotiate as hard as possible
to make an example of Britain.
Basically, it seems like whoever
the next UK Prime Minister is going to be--
whether it's Boris Johnson,
or a racist teakettle--
they are going to be in for a rough few years,
because once they invoke what's known as article 50,
they have just two years to negotiate their withdrawal
and future relationship with the EU,
on top of which they'll have to settle
outstanding bills with the EU,
hammer out new trade deals with dozens of countries,
sift through thousands of EU regulations
and decide which ones to keep,
and figure out how migration will work,
and all the while, lives hang in the balance.
Take this Portuguese woman who has lived in the UK for years
and has built a life there.
- I have two daughters.
One was born in Portugal.
The second one was born in the UK.
And they asked me this morning,
"Mom, what is going to happen to us?"
And I told them, "At this point, no one knows."
I don't know my future.
I don't know how to explain my children
what is going to happen to their future.
- Oh, perhaps I can help you with that, 'cause it's easy.
Just tell them that they might be screwed
because a pig-fucker called for a vote,
a bus had some bullshit written on it,
and then two idiots named Nigel and Boris
quoted President Bill Pullman.
They'll get it. They'll totally understand.
And it is-- it's frankly hard not to think
that some Britons may not have fully thought this through,
especially when you look at some of the top search terms
concerning the EU the next day.
- Some of the most Googled questions in the UK
since the polls closed last night:
"What does it mean to leave the EU?"
and "What is the EU?"
- Okay, that is clearly not good.
On the list of all-time bad morning-after Googles,
that's got to be up there with
"Can I get pregnant from mouth stuff?"
and "What is a swastika,
and also, how do you remove a tattoo?"
And at least one person who voted to leave
seems to have buyer's remorse.
- I was very disappointed about the results,
even though I voted to leave.
Um...this morning, I woke up, and I just--
the reality did actually hit me,
but if I had the opportunity to vote again,
it would be to stay.
- Well, well, you're actually in luck,
because it turns out, incredibly,
there is going to be another vote coming up,
uh, and it's happening one week from--
of course there isn't!
That was the fucking vote!
It wasn't a practice vote!
That was it!
And as if--as if all this couldn't get any worse,
as the full impact of what Britain had just done
was sinking in,
Donald Trump turned up in Scotland to promote
his fucking golf course.
And when he was asked about whether he,
the presumptive Republican nominee,
had any thoughts on the seismic events unfolding in Europe,
this was his response.
- I think it's going to end up being a great thing,
and the beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing is,
your people have taken the country back,
and there's something very, very nice about that,
and they voted, and it's been peaceful,
and it was strong, and very contentious,
and in many respects-- I watched last night,
it was a little bit ugly--
but it's been an amazing process to watch.
- He--he just said absolutely nothing.
Because--let me explain.
First, he said a Brexit will end up being great,
which it very likely won't.
Then, he said the word "beautiful" three times.
Then he said, "Your people have taken the country back,"
even though he was in Scotland,
which overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU.
Then, he said, "It's been peaceful,"
which it absolutely hasn't.
Then, he immediately contradicted himself by saying
it's been "contentious" and "ugly."
And then he summed the whole thing up as "amazing."
Now, if he had simply breathed audibly into the microphone,
the same amount of information would have been conveyed.
And the thing is, later that day,
he found a way to make this whole thing about himself,
tweeting, "Many people are equating Brexit,
"and what is going on in Great Britain,
"with what is happening in the U.S.
People want their country back."
And you might think, well, that is not
going to happen to us in America.
We're not going to listen to some ridiculously-haired
buffoon peddling lies and nativism in the hopes
of riding a protest vote into power.
Well, let Britain tell you:
it can happen, and when it does,
there are no fucking do-overs.
And now this.
- Guys, you know, full disclosure--
I'm a little terrified of clowns.
- I have a fear of flying.
- I'm afraid of drowning.
- I'm scared of computers.
- Nuns were raising me,
so I have a fear of penguins.
- Number one fear is elevators.
- I have a fear of two things:
mice and heights.
- Sharks. I am terrified of them.
- As a kid I had, uh,
I was terrified of-- of quicksand.
- I have a fear of the snooze.
I have a fear of losing gift cards.
I have a phobia of being tickled.
I sweat through my dress.
- Are you scared of cats?
- I--I'm afraid of adult cats.
Everything I'm reading in this prompter
terrifies me right now.
[lighthearted orchestral music]
- Moving on.
Moving on.
Our main story tonight concerns the Olympics,
otherwise known as your biennial reminder
that NBC exists.
The--the Rio games are just around the corner,
so get ready for plenty of sappy athlete profiles
like these...
female reporter: Tori Bowie is a sprinter
climbing her way to the top.
Her success exceeds far beyond
the unkempt field she started on in high school.
male reporter: At his childhood pool,
there's still a bench where he was forced to sit
and take time-outs,
but what others struggled to contain in daily life
Phelps put to full purpose
when there was something on the line.
male reporter: Burroughs is powered by the elemental truth
of the sport that fills his dreams.
- Yes!
Those videos aren't just uplifting,
that's basically inspiration porn.
That--that's what a fireworks display watches
when it wants to jerk off.
But--but while the Olympics feature thrillery--
thrilling displays of athletic prowess,
they can also take place beneath the dark shadow cast
by doping scandals,
and this Olympics is no exception.
male reporter: According to a report that reads
like a Cold War spy thriller,
Russian secret agents
and a mysterious Moscow laboratory
were used for state-sanctioned doping.
A Russian athlete and trainer
secretly filmed drugs being handed out like candy.
male reporter: Russia accused, staggeringly,
of using its Security Services--
its new KGB--
to tamper with supposedly tamper-proof bottles,
allegedly using this hole in the laboratory wall
to switch samples.
- It's true.
A Russian lab used a secret hole in the wall
in an attempt to win Olympic medals,
making this the first known example of a literal glory hole.
And--and just listen-- just listen to how the athletes
ingested some of the drugs in the first place.
- Rodchenkov's cocktails of three different
performance-enhancing drugs were, on his instructions,
washed down by athletes with alcohol
to shorten the detection period--
Chivas for male athletes,
vermouth for the ladies.
- Wait, wait.
"Vermouth for the ladies"?
Look, I get doping is still going on, but I'd hoped
that unnecessarily-gendered illegal products died--
died out with the Virginia Slims crack pipe.
#FEMINISM. #CRACKPIPES.
Now, Russia's track-and-field team
is currently banned from competing
at the upcoming Olympics,
but there is nothing new about this story.
For as long as there's been science,
people have used it to juice the human body.
In the 1920s, a Russian-born French surgeon
grafted thin slices of chimp testicles
into people's scrotums,
which was obviously ridiculous.
These days, we know you need a thick slice
of chimp testicles.
That's when it starts to work.
And there's a long history of athletes
circumventing the rules.
In the 1904 Olympics, one of the marathon runners
rode 11 miles in a car,
a move that takes balls so big,
they must've included a massive slice of chimp nuts.
Now, as for the modern era,
while no one knows exactly how many athletes dope,
there are some shocking hints.
One leaked survey found that an estimated 29%
of track-and-field athletes at the 2011 World Championships
said that they had doped in the past year,
and presumably, that doesn't even include
'roided-out athletes who responded by yelling,
"Survey make me angry,"
crumpling it up, and throwing it to the moon.
But the prevalence of doping
is a little surprising when you consider how rigorous
the testing regimes in top sports can be.
Watch what happens to one runner
just seconds after she crosses the finish line.
male reporter: From now until she's able to provide a sample,
two things will be constant:
water and Flanagan's anti-doping chaperone.
The chaperone makes sure the athlete doesn't try
to cheat her drug test.
- It's a big-time buzzkill. Um...
'Cause you're really excited,
and you want to enjoy the moment,
but then at the same time,
um, yeah, you got to get focused
and get ready to pee.
- Now, that-- that's got to be tough,
'cause you're probably not ready to pee on command
just after finishing a race.
That's not what your body
is prepared to do at that moment.
It's like asking someone to have an orgasm
in the middle of test-driving a Nissan Cube.
It's-- it's not going to be easy.
That could take a while.
And if you think it's not fun for the athletes,
it's not that much fun for the testers either.
"Real Sports" followed one of them
on a surprise out-of-competition test.
male reporter: His task this early Saturday morning
is to collect a sample from an elite rower
named Aleks Zosuls.
Aleks agreed to let us film the moment of truth.
Lowell is required to witness and have an unobstructed view.
- Oh, my God.
That--that is the face of a man
reconsidering every single decision
he has made in his life,
while also desperately wishing
that athlete had not had asparagus for dinner.
But despite rigorous testing,
athletes are clearly slipping through the cracks
for a number of reasons.
For a start, there are multiple tests,
and none of them can detect
the full range of drugs an athlete might be on,
from anabolic steroids to EPO to human growth hormone
to the most powerful drug of all:
love.
And testing itself, it--it's much less
black-and-white than you might assume.
There are wide variations in human biochemistry,
so to avoid false positives,
testing thresholds are often deliberately high,
and athletes can dope and still come below those thresholds
by doing things like microdosing
or using masking agents to hide banned substances.
And those are just some ways
that it's possible for top athletes to cheat
while still being able to say things like this...
- People are smart.
Do they say, "Has Lance Armstrong ever tested positive?"
No.
"Has Lance Armstrong been tested?"
A lot.
- Wow, that is some confident lying,
which isn't really surprising.
Remember, this is the man who looked America dead in the eyes
and said, "Bicycling is a very cool sport,"
and we fucking believed him.
And--and the techniques some athletes have used
to beat the system have been amazingly imaginative.
Take, for instance, the European cyclists
who would insert condoms of clean urine into their anus
and then, in order to conceal everything,
would cover it with fake hair,
blending into the real hair of the nether regions.
And you have to imagine
that to convince a cyclist to do that,
a coach would need to deliver the most inspirational speech
in the history of sports.
"Hey, do you want to be a champion?
"Do you? Then you jam in that piss balloon,
"pick up that hot glue gun,
"slap on that anus-Birkin,
"and ride like a champion!
"Full anus! Clear tests!
"Can't lose! Get out there!
Get out there and ride!"
[cheers and applause]
And--and when they have tested positive,
the excuses have been even more imaginative.
Former sprinter Dennis Mitchell
insisted his positive test for testosterone was the result
of having sex at least
four times the night before
and drinking five bottles of beer.
And if that is what your life is like,
you don't really need the Olympics.
Now, other--other athletes have blamed positive tests
on eating a pie made from doped-up racing pigeons,
or eating a stew of meat and organs from uncastrated boars.
And I'll say this:
if Wheaties is really the "breakfast of champions,"
their ingredient list will now include
pigeon meat and pig jizz, or it's over.
But--but none of that beats my favorite excuse of all time.
male reporter: Cyclist Tyler Hamilton
had to explain why somebody else's blood was in his veins.
He claimed a vanished twin,
absorbed by his body in the womb.
The court didn't buy it.
- Oh, but that twin isn't vanished.
It's me.
I'm your brother, Tyler.
And my name isn't John Oliver,
it's Skyler.
Skyler Hamilton.
And together, we are:
Skyler and Tyler Hamilton.
A pair of un-vanished twins.
And we're both equally good at biking.
And in a way-- in a way,
you can see why athletes might want to dope.
A split-second advantage
can make the difference between winning and losing,
and there's a lot of money on the line for everyone.
There is a massive financial ecosystem
dependent on spectacular athletic achievement
in scandal-free games,
and that includes the networks,
who reap over a billion in ad sales,
the IOC, which reaps billions in broadcast rights,
and then there's the sponsors, who love using Olympics athletes
for ads like these...
male announcer: To perform your best,
training's got to be a lifelong passion.
- Michael!
announcer: Fueled by a foot-long passion.
That's why Debbie Phelps is always there
for her son Michael,
with his favorite flavor-packed,
fully-jacked footlong subs.
- Stop.
Because first,
no professional swimmer wants a sandwich in the pool.
And--and for the record,
there is nothing more viscerally upsetting
than a woman feeding her soaking wet, nearly naked,
adult son something called a fully-jacked footlong.
And when you combine-- the point is,
when you combine all the money
incentivizing athletes to get an edge
with all the imperfections of tests,
you would hope there'd be a robust,
independent monitoring system in place.
Unfortunately, some countries lack
the resources for strong testing,
while others seem to lack the desire.
And to get a sense of just how compromised
the system can become,
let's go back to what happened in Russia,
because here's how things worked.
This is a Russian track-and-field athlete.
He would compete for his national sports federation--
in this case, ARAF.
That federation would be under both the international body
governing track and field, the IAAF,
and the Russian Ministry of Sport,
uh, which is, of course, part of the Russian government.
Now, separately, he would be tested
by his country's anti-doping agency,
in this case, RUSADA,
who would send it to a laboratory,
which is credited by the World Anti-Doping Agency,
or WADA, which receives funding
from both the IOC and countries like Russia.
And already, you can see this system looks like
a sprawling mess. But I guess, technically,
it could work if each step
was genuinely committed to stamping out doping.
However, you've already seen
that that one lab had a glory hole,
and on top of that, a recent investigation found
that RUSADA offices routinely accepted bribes from athletes
and gave them advance notice of when they'd be tested,
and it also found the former head of ARAF
had worked with the director of that glory-holed lab
to conceal positive drug tests.
And while you would hope that the IAAF would have been
rooting all of this out,
the head of their anti-doping department
was banned for five years after an ethics investigation.
At which point, this is all actually making FIFA look good.
FIFA!
Fucking FIFA!
And they are basically
just a mafia with slightly better branding.
And finally, there is WADA.
Now, they're supposed to help prevent things like this,
but their investigation of the scandal
got off to a rocky start,
because we really only have all this information
thanks to a whistleblower,
a former RUSADA employee named Vitaly Stepanov.
He approached WADA with a great deal of information,
but their response was not reassuring.
male reporter: He sent 200 emails and 50 letters
detailing what he had witnessed,
but Vitaly says WADA told him
it did not have the power to investigate inside Russia.
- Now, that is true.
At that point, WADA didn't have
the explicit authority,
but that's a bit weird in and of itself.
You don't want the global anti-drug agency
to basically have the authority of mall cops.
"Hey, thief!
"Stop or I'll be forced to go straight to the food court
"and grumble about your behavior
into a bag of Wetzel's Pretzels cinnabits."
And while WADA now has more authority,
and has appointed an independent commission
to investigate the evolving Russia scandal,
their head, Craig Reedie, sent a weirdly cozy email
to an advisor to the Russia sports minister saying...
Which is an unsettlingly chummy tone for a regulator to take.
If Tom Colicchio promised to judge "Top Chef" fairly,
but then said to one contestant,
"I value my relationship with you
and will do nothing to affect it,"
the other contestants would rightly think,
"This is clearly pointless.
Here's a Hot Pocket. Go fuck yourself."
And at this point,
I--I'm supposed to tell you
that Russian officials and the former head of ARAF
have broadly denied all these accusations,
and for his part, Reedie says he's done nothing
to interfere with the commission's investigations
and his email had been misconstrued.
And, you know...sure.
And--and while this--
while this clearly isn't the system we need,
it might actually be the system we want.
Just listen to former Head of WADA,
the phenomenally-named Dick Pound,
who--who has a depressing theory
about why more dopers aren't caught.
- Machinery's all there.
The question is,
do people really want it to work?
I mean, you can-- you can do hundreds of thousands
of tests and catch nobody
if you don't want to catch anybody.
- Is that what you think is happening,
that people don't want it to work?
- People don't want it work.
- Okay, well, first, Dick Pound should really insist
that everyone call him Rick or Rich,
if he really wants anyone to fully listen to him,
but--but second, he actually wrote a report for WADA,
assessing the state of drug testing,
which found, among the broader sports community...
Which is pretty alarming.
We're treating good testing
like calorie counts on restaurant menus.
Oh, everyone might say they want it
until they find out that one Bloomin' Onion
is 32 million calories,
and then they are fucking done.
And you might be thinking, well, let's just give up.
Why don't--why don't we just let everyone dope?
But that is definitely not the answer.
For a start, that could be very dangerous,
with athletes tempted to take greater and greater amounts
to get that split-second edge,
and it could also potentially force clean athletes to dope,
at which point, you've pretty much destroyed
the integrity of sport.
Because if you want to know what it's like to compete
against an artificially-enhanced athlete,
just listen to Alysia Montano.
She lost at the 2012 Olympics to Mariya Savinova,
one of the Russian athletes
implicated in the current doping scandal.
male reporter: This was the first time
Montano allowed herself to watch the race
she lost to gold medalist Mariya Savinova.
Montano had led the race for about 600 meters,
before finishing fifth.
I mean, Savinova passed you like you were, with all due respect--
- Literally standing still. - Yeah.
- Yeah, and you realize...
at that moment, I real-- I realized,
I'm racing against robots.
- Robots?
- I'm racing against robots.
- She's racing against robots,
and it wasn't just Savinova, because silver and bronze
went to a Roomba and a 'roided-out Teddy Ruxpin.
And--and when she competed against those same Russian
athletes at the World Championships the next year,
it was deja vu.
male reporter: Savinova blew by her
in the last 50 meters to finish second.
All Montano could do was throw herself across the finish line,
beaten, and, for the first time, broken.
- And I felt really failed, and really betrayed,
and I actually felt like my career was a farce.
You know, that this is just--
what am I doing out here? What's the point?
- "What am I doing here? What's the point?"
She's a world-class athlete
and she was left feeling like anyone who paid for a ticket
to--to "Now You See Me 2."
"What are we doing here?
"Wh-what are any of us doing here?
"What's the point in this?
What are we doing?"
[cheers and applause]
And look--look, we've focused on Russia here
because the details are spectacular,
but they are far from the only offenders.
In recent years, Kenya, Jamaica, and China
have all had doping scandals,
and American athletes have cheated too.
Justin Gatlin and Tyson Gay
have both been banned for doping in the past,
yet they're still expected to compete in Rio
for the U.S. team.
So think of doping like Vladimir Putin.
It's far from just a Russian problem.
It's something that adversely affects the entire world.
So it feels like we have two choices at this point.
If--if we truly want to clean up sports,
we should empower WADA by making it truly independent
and put pressure on the broader sports system
to aggressively combat doping.
And if we don't really care enough to make changes,
we should, at the very least,
make our syrupy athlete promos a bit more honest.
[triumphant brass music]
*
- Ever since I was a kid, I've loved to run.
[gun fires]
My parents sometimes tell me I could run before I could walk.
Which doesn't really make sense, but I always believed them.
*
male narrator: It's 5:00 a.m.,
and Olympic hopeful Brandon Schmidt
has already been at the gym for two hours with his coach.
- Push it!
Push it.
Push it!
I've been working with Brandon
ever since he was eight years old.
I discovered him sprinting across a playground.
That's how I used to find my runners.
Just hang out at playgrounds. Look for the quickest kid.
Can't do that anymore, of course.
narrator: For Brandon,
every morning, it's the same routine.
- First, I do cardio,
then weights, and then,
it's just all the pills I can cram into my mouth.
- Push it!
narrator: Brandon's road to Rio began years ago,
in a small bedroom in Darbyville, Ohio.
- When I was a kid, I had posters of all my heroes:
Lance Armstrong,
Marion Jones,
Ben Johnson,
Mark McGwire,
and that one guy who took a car
for 11 miles of an Olympic marathon.
I wanted to be just like them.
narrator: From those modest beginnings,
Coach Jason Clark helped fill Brandon
with the stuff winners are made of.
- Here, you need your purples.
We've tried pills containing everything:
cat dick, dog dick,
lizard dick, rhino dick,
badger balls, muskrat anuses,
chipmunk fists, moose face,
a 5-hour ENERGY shot straight into his eyeball.
- Aah! Ow!
- One time I put a tampon full of jet fuel up his ass.
- Push it! - [grunting]
- Another time, I got Regis Philbin
to scream into a jar and then had him inhale him.
All of this, just to get that edge.
narrator: But even the most prepared athlete
can sometimes get caught, and that's when Brandon relies
on Coach Clark's strict regimen of excuses.
- And... go!
- I slipped and fell in a vat of liquid amphetamines.
- Good. Next!
- I was walking down this dark back alley,
and a guy came up and stabbed me
with a syringe full of EPO.
- Sweeter. Sweeter!
- I ate my twin in the womb.
- I don't believe you!
- An uncastrated boar spit in my mouth.
- Plausible. I like it.
Stick the landing.
- Last night, I drank five beers
and fucked everyone in America.
- Time!
- How'd I do?
- You're ready.
*
narrator: Now, with his eyes on Rio and Olympic gold,
Brandon Schmidt is hoping that his years of hard work
will finally pay off.
- For me, to win in Rio,
that'd be a fairy tale come true, you know?
It'd be a Cinderella story,
but like if the slipper didn't actually belong to Cinderella
and she took a lot of drugs to change the size of her foot
to fit in the slipper,
and then Prince Charming fell for it,
and they lived happily ever after.
*
That's my dream.
*
- That's our show. Thank you so much for watching.
We're off for a few weeks. We'll be back July 24th.
Good night!
[cheers and applause]
- Push it!
Push it! Push it.
[quietly] Push it.
Push it!
Push it. Push it!
Push it.
[upbeat rock music]
*
[bright tone]