Is there any truth to Sun Yang’s wild claims?

So, a mystery construction worker is alleged to have been part of the testing team to collect a sample from Sun Yang. Mike Colman looks into whether there’s any substance to the claims.

If this Sun Yang drama wasn’t so serious it would be a comedy.

The latest “explosive twist” in the saga is a mystery construction worker claiming that he was part of the drug testing team that arrived at Sun Yang’s house unannounced in September last year.

“I know nothing about drug-testing procedure. I was just helping out an old school friend,” he told a Chinese news agency on the condition of anonymity.

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And Sun Yang’s lawyers want it to be admitted as evidence in the case being heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is investigating his destruction of the blood samples taken that night.

Their defence all along has been that Sun (well, actually his mother) instructed his bodyguard to smash the vial because the testers did not have the correct accreditation.

As Sun said to the CAS panel as he gestured to the roomful of reporters covering the hearing in Switzerland, “any of these people could come to my house and say they were drug testers”.

One of Sun Yang’s doping testers claims he is simply a builder. Picture: AFP

Actually, that is not such a wild claim because, like the mystery construction worker, I have often been contacted by old school friends asking me to come along and help them collect drug samples from world champion athletes.

It is a little-known fact that I was in the room helping out when Lance Armstrong was tested during the 2004 Tour de France.

We might well have caught him that year too, but unfortunately the doctor doing the test (who was actually a petrol station attendant who was helping out a girl he’d met on Tinder) couldn’t stand the sight of blood and passed out, dropping the sample.

I mopped it all up with one of Lance’s old singlets which the test supervisor – a florist from the town we were in who had knocked on the door trying to get an autograph – had then sent into the authorities, who found it was rife with positive traces of erythropoietin, diuretics, human growth hormone, EPO and Brut 33 deodorant.

Incredibly, he got off on a technicality – his lawyers successfully argued that Brut 33 is not performance enhancing – but it was a close-run thing.

It remains to be seen whether Sun will be as fortunate.