Well. Now we know. The World Radio Team Championship 2026 was riddled with cheating. To the point that four teams have been disqualified and the results of WRTC 2026 have changed. This is nuts. Complete insanity. WRTC should fold its tent and terminate the event. Permanently. Operators were hand-selected from what were supposed to be the cream of the crop in the world of radio sport yet four teams out of twenty-three cheated.

And lest you think this simply an outlier in an otherwise noble sport:

“Inspection of the Italian WRTC-2023 logs and activity information shows that the same three-part multiplier fraud took place in that event, bringing up potential rescoring of that competition as well. The fraud was not reported or acted upon in the three intervening years.”

This part of our hobby deserves to go dark and never be acknowledged again.

From the re-scoring committee report:

“Amateur radio contests are conducted under the belief that participants are honest. For example, contact and multiplier credit is typically given to an entrant’s score, even when no log is received from a claimed contact. This scheme took explicit advantage of that trust.”