Swim coach Denis Cotterell attacks Sun Yang’s accusers as being in ‘glass houses’
EXCLUSIVE: Swim coach Denis Cotterell has accused those attacking Chinese Olympic champion Sun Yang as a “drug cheat” of throwing stones from “glass houses”.
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SWIM coach Denis Cotterell has accused those attacking Chinese Olympic champion Sun Yang as a “drug cheat” of throwing stones from “glass houses”.
Cotterell, who is coaching Yang for the next Olympics after cutting ties with Australian swimming, also took a veiled swipe at Aussie swimmers for being lazy, after the pair were seen at their training base on the Gold Coast this week.
Taking aim at freestyle champion Mack Horton, who branded Yang a doper prior to the 400m freestyle final in Rio, Cotterell said his swimmer has unfairly been branded a “cheat for life” while Australia’s own murky history around performance enhancing drugs was being ignored.
In one of the biggest scandals of the Rio Games, Horton — renowned as a clean athlete who has never returned a positive test — delivered his now-infamous take down of Yang, saying he didn’t “have time or respect for drug cheats”.
Yang, a megastar in China and one of the most controversial figures in world sport, served a three-month suspension in 2014 after returning a positive test for the banned substance Trimetazidine, which he claimed he took for a heart condition.
His doctor, Ba Zhen, was also given a one-year ban from all sport.
Singling out Samantha Riley’s positive test back in 1995 and, more recently, Kylie Palmer’s positive test in 2013, Cotterell said Australians were too quick to attack rival nations for drug infractions but more forgiving when it came to their own.
“I was there when Sam got busted. Did we call her a cheat for the rest of her life?” Cotterell said of Riley, who returned a test for Propoxyphene metabolite at the World Short-course Championships in Rio in 1995.
Riley escaped a ban, but her coach Scott Volkers was banned from pool decks for two years.
Palmer, an emerging freestyle star when she tested positive for a steroid masking agent in 2013, also escaped a ban but retired from swimming after failing to qualify to Rio de Janeiro.
“It’s nice when you’re in glass houses,” Cotterell said.
“There is a distinction between positives and suspension types and if there isn’t, well, Kylie Palmer is a cheat and it’s lucky she didn’t come back.
“I’m not saying it but by that same dialogue, by that same rationale, Sam Riley is a cheat too. But we didn’t say that did we?
“We go, ‘Oh yeah, great Mack. That’s a great statement’. And we say, ‘Oh yeah, we want a clean sport, we want this and that’. We say, ‘Oh doping isn’t systemic (in Australia), it’s not planned’.
“But Sun Yang is a cheat for life.
“If you want to play that way, I mean, I’m not going to say it, but does race have something to do with it? I don’t know. But it’s nice when you’re in glass houses.”
Cotterell, who has long been an advocate for the Chinese swimming program after he first developed ties with Yang back in 2008, also praised the foreigners for their training ethic.
“They do train hard and they keep the flame burning for me,” he said. “They fan my fire by their output.
“They look like they want to be there and they look like they want to be producing results, and that’s the level I am used to.”
The legendary coach has hosted a steady stream of swimmers from China, Japan and Korea at his base at the Miami Swimming Club. However, none have matched the success of Yang, who is now widely regarded as the greatest 1500m swimmer of all time.
Ironically, it’s a title he stole from Cotterell’s previous star pupil Grant Hackett, a swimmer who never tested positive for banned substances but who has waged a long battle with prescription drug addiction.
Cotterell has all but cut ties with Australian swimmers and coaches just a handful of local age-group athletes, with Yang the main priority leading up to the 2020 Games in Tokyo.
LET’S FACE UP TO OUR MURKY PAST
DRUG cheats. We’ve had a few. Denis Cotterell has a point when it comes to Australian swimming’s murky drug-taking history.
Kylie Palmer’s two positive samples to a diuretic. Sam Riley took a “headache tablet” which turned out to be a stimulant. Two permanent stains on our golden past.
But whenever one of usgo positive there’s usually a chorus of sycophants quick to suggest it’s because of a dodgy testing method or contaminated meat or juice.
But anyone in elite sport knows there’s rarely such thing as an accident when it comes to doping.
Now one of the world’s most famous drug cheats Sun Yang has breezed in and taken over one of Australia’s foundation swimming clubs, officially coached by one of this country’s greatest ever coaches.
Miami’s most famous graduate, Grant Hackett, the man Cotterell guided to Olympic glory, has developed a prescription drug dependency after using Stilnox during his swimming career.
He is said to be headed for rehabilitation.
In the past Hackett was annoyed by suggestions Cotterell was coaching Sun Yang behind his back in the lead-up to Rio, saying he hoped it wasn’t happening.
However, his Miami club mate and champion swimmer Thomas Fraser-Holmes couldn’t hold back his disgust sharing the pool with Cotterell’s Chinese swimmers, and infamously stormed out of a pre-Olympic training session in protest.
A poor build-up and injury marred Fraser-Holmes’s Games. Hackett failed to make it. And now Yang, the man who smashed his 1500m record, is back at Miami.
The bottom line is that the issue of drugs in swimming, whether here or China, needs greater attention.
Cotterell is expected to exit Miami by May and exclusively become China’s coaching weapon.
He’s a great loss to Australian sport but his straighttalking views and tough methods might not be missed by some.
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