The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) confirmed this Saturday that 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for trimetazidine before the Tokyo Games, held in the summer of 2021, and despite the evidence it did not act to prevent them from competing or publish the facts. The WADA, chaired by Polish politician Witold Banka, accepted China’s allegations. The federation of the Asian country excused the athletes with the argument that they had been contaminated by accident and in minimal quantities.
Several of the swimmers who tested positive ended up on the Tokyo Olympic podium with medals around their necks. Zhang Yufei, the 200m butterfly and 4x200m relay champion, shone among the exonerated. The 30-member Chinese team won a total of six medals, including three gold. Now Zhang Yufei, among other swimmers involved, are preparing to compete in next summer’s Paris Games. But the scandal that has just erupted reaches unknown proportions. The institutional crisis revealed by the actions of the WADA has unleashed a storm of unpredictable consequences for the International Olympic Committee, forced to position itself before China in one of the most complex geopolitical moments that Olympism has addressed in the last half century. The Asian power was second on the medal table in Tokyo, where it won 89 trophies, only below the 113 of the United States. Since then, both countries have waged a cold confrontation on the commercial and military level.
The New York Times, which published the news this Saturday, included statements from the executive director of the American Anti-Doping Agency, Travis T. Tygart, apparently outraged with his colleagues at the headquarters. “This appears to be a devastating stab in the back of clean athletes, a deep betrayal of all those athletes who compete fairly and abide by the rules.” Tygart acknowledged that since 2020 he had denounced doping in Chinese swimming on numerous occasions. “All those with dirty hands from hiding positives so much,” he said, “who silenced brave informers, must be brought to justice.”
WADA admitted that in June 2021 it received news that 23 Chinese swimmers had failed the anti-doping test for positive trimetazidine, a drug used to treat angina pectoris. But he ended up admitting the Chinese federation’s excuses. “WADA concluded that it could not rule out the possibility that accidental contamination had been the cause of the presence of the drug in the swimmers’ bodies,” it said in a statement this Saturday. Without extenuating circumstances, the regulations indicate that all athletes who fail the control will be suspended for between two and four years after the first violation, and for life after the second.
For years, officials from anti-doping agencies around the world passed information to WADA about alleged doping cover-ups in Chinese swimming. But according to The New York Times the AMA decided not to act. “There is no credible evidence,” was the response. The experts consulted by the American newspaper on condition of anonymity indicated that the lack of transparency with which the investigation was carried out by the AMA was abnormal. After examining the positives, the Chinese authorities stated that the swimmers had been concentrated in a hotel at Christmas 2020 and were contaminated through food with a drug for therapeutic use for heart patients that has augmentative effects on aerobic capacity. Anti-doping experts admit that the explanation is plausible. “In the end we understood that we had no basis to dismiss the contamination hypothesis; This was compatible with the data in the analyzes provided,” said Olivier Rabin, director of Science and Medicine at the AMA.
World Aquatics shrugs
World Aquatics, the international swimming federation, was aware of the positives. A spokesperson for the former FINA pointed out this Saturday that if the regulatory body did nothing in the summer of 2021 it was because it left the management of the problem in the hands of WADA. “We carefully consider the cases,” this spokesperson told the Reuters agency; “and we trust that they would be resolved with diligence and professionalism, in accordance with WADA anti-doping regulations.”
Doping in Chinese swimming chains a series that began at the 1994 World Cups in Rome, when the Chinese women’s team concluded a barren history of aquatic successes to win 12 gold medals. The summer festival is over in autumn. Le Jingyi, He Cihong, Lu Bin, Dai Huohng, and Yang Aihua, the heroines of the Foro Italico pool, tested positive for an anabolic called dihydrostestosterone (DHT). It was a powerful indication of systematic state doping. Prelude to the fall from grace of Sun Yang, the best Chinese swimmer in history, the first man to win world and Olympic medals in all free swimming distances between 200m and 1,500m, suspended for eight years in 2021 for refusing to pass a surprise doping control.
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