Chinese swimmers 'seen' injecting themselves before Rio 2016 - Town Square #1
WADA defends the 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive before Tokyo 2020 despite the fact the country's swim squad were embroiled in multiple scandals before the previous Olympics.
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The coverage of the ongoing Chinese swimming doping scandal has been dominated by debate over whether, or not, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) swept the 23 cases ‘under the carpet’. WADA is resolutely defending its actions which it argues, by the letter of the law, were proper.
WADA accepted the Chinese anti-doping agency’s finding that swimmers tested positive for the heart medication trimetazidine after the spice box in the kitchen of their athlete hotel became contaminated by the drug.
In a bid to preserve its reputation, a WADA executive committee member is now stating, as a fact, that these 23 Chinese swimmers are innocent athletes. When one propagates the narrative that the swimmers are all innocent athletes, it of course makes WADA’s decision to allow the cases to be dropped more understandable.
“It is a matter of great concern for us that these athletes, who given the facts of this case, are entirely innocent and, in fact, victims of contamination without any fault or negligence on their side, are now being accused of wrongdoing with their names and sensitive details about them being published,” said the WADA Executive Committee member Ryan Pini in a recent article.
This is the public relations route WADA has chosen.
For many, however, who are not in WADA’s position of weakness, it becomes easy to take a step back and question whether we should really believe that the 23 Chinese swimmers who tested before the Tokyo 2021 Olympics were victims of a mass contamination event.
A truth that becomes, at least, more difficult to embrace when one considers the events, involving the Chinese swim squad, that unfolded before the Olympics prior to Tokyo.
In July 2016, the Chinese swimming team was training at the Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California during a pre-Olympic training camp. The Rio Olympics were just weeks away, but the squad would be suspected of doping before their departure for Brazil.
Lynbrook High School, which has a large Asian-American student population, is home to an Olympic size swimming pool and the Chinese team were using these facilities throughout their camp.
However, at the end of a training session on July 7th, a swim parent saw the Chinese athletes doing something that he would later report to the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA).
According to the parent, the swimmers were injecting themselves with needles, and also swallowing pills in the high school locker room.
To quote the parent’s claims, which were forwarded to USADA, there were “members of the Chinese national team injecting themselves with needles in the locker room. They were also ingesting pills. When asked by the parent (who speaks Mandarin) about what they were doing, the athletes said it was nutrients and vitamins”.
Upon receiving the whistle-blower report, the head of the USADA doping control department ordered for the 22 Chinese swimmers to be tested on July 16th and 17th 2016. USADA did not confirm whether the results came back negative, according to Der Spiegel. But when USADA arrived to test the team five days later, the swimmer had left California.
It is stories like this, involving 22 Chinese Olympic-level swimmers before Rio 2016, that casts doubt on the innocence of the 23 Olympics-level swimmers who tested positive before Tokyo 2021.
In response to the Lynbrook High School scandal, the Chinese Swimming Association said that “anyone with basic common sense shall understand these information (sic) are ignorant and outrageous, and malevolent".
The federation claimed that it had a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to doping. A claim that was farfetched given events that had taken place just a month earlier.
In May that year, before moving their camp to California, these Chinese swimmers, or at least some of them, were training at the Gloria Sports Arena in Belek, Turkey.