Town Square #1: Chinese swimmers 'seen' injecting themselves before Rio 2016
WADA defends the 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive before Tokyo 2021 despite the fact the country's swim squad were embroiled in multiple scandals before the previous Olympics.
I publish Long Reads on doping in sport, along with a bi-weekly press round-up in which I summarise all of the latest doping news from the last seven days.
The Town Square is a place where I cover recent anti-doping issues, and answer any questions my subscribers have about my longer doping investigations. It also has resources to learn about doping in sports (link).
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.
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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.
The area has long been a haven for dopers in search of easy access to pharmaceutical grade drugs. In 2013, two graduate students, for a thesis, visited 150 pharmacies in the area. They were able to buy EPO without a prescription in 127 of them. Something the Italian racewalker Alex Schwazer, who won gold at Beijing 2008, did in 2012.
But for the Chinese squad they were not suspected of purchasing drugs in Turkey, but instead showing tolerance to a Chinese swim coach once banned for doping.
The 20-strong Chinese squad, featuring nine Olympians, was rumoured to have been seen on the pool deck in Turkey alongside the disgraced coach Zhou Ming.
Zhou was banned by the world governing body World Aquatics for his involvement in the doping scandal that took place at the 1998 World Championships in Australia. Four Chinese swimmers tested positive, and vials of human growth hormone were discovered in a swimmer's bag by customs authorities.
Zhou had also been previously seen on the pool deck at the Chinese National Games in 2009.
One assumes that these events which took place before Rio 2016, were considered by WADA when they decided on the cases of the 23 Chinese swimmers before Tokyo 2021.
Ultimately, WADA accepted that the Chinese anti-doping agency’s ruling that the swimmers were victims of contamination. Just as WADA had done five years prior, when three members of the Chinese swim squad escaped a suspension after testing positive for clenbuterol.
You can read an article I wrote about five doping cases on the University of Texas swimming team here (link). One of the US swimmers initially argued that she tested positive for the same drug as the 23 Chinese swimmers (trimetazidine) after the municipal water supply became contaminated. Trimetazidine is not available in the US but it was accepted, by an appeal tribunal, that the US swimmer’s supplements had been contaminated.