David Penberthy: Hey China, we reserve the right to call out cheats
Mack Horton’s podium protest against Sun Yang is more than a one-man stand against cheats. It sends the message that we won’t ignore China’s questionable standards, regardless of their rage, writes David Penberthy.
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As is the case in most democratic nations, Australians have a deep-seated mistrust if not fear of China.
I am not a Chinaphobe, and cannot understand why so many Australians are unable to recognise that our continuing prosperity and employment rate is linked in large part to our growing trade relationship with the world’s most populous nation.
Having said that, the manner in which China expects other nations to either fit in with or ignore its own questionable standards when it comes to human rights, freedom of speech and the right to peaceful protest is something that will always ensure that Beijing is regarded in the west with suspicion, if not hostility.
This week, it was a swimming pool that provided the unlikely venue for this clash of cultures and ideologies to be played out.
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Australians have instinctively hailed our swimmer Mack Horton as something of a hero after his exquisite up-yours to Chinese 400m freestyle “champion” Sun Yang.
I have used quotation marks around the word “champion” because all of Yang’s sporting achievements deserve some cautious quotation marks inserted around them. The guy cannot be described with any confidence or accuracy as a champion.
He’s merely the latest questionable embodiment of what happens when a sporting governing body fails to recognise and expose an ugly secret lurking within, in much the same way cycling authorities did for so long with that discredited hero, Lance Armstrong, and others among his juiced-up brethren.
The extent of Sun’s misdemeanours have been somewhat clouded amid all the rage that followed Horton’s podium boycott, and the protest staged in solidarity by the Scotsman Duncan Scott after he was pipped in the 200m freestyle at the world championships in Gwangju on Tuesday.
Yes, Sun is a convicted drug cheat, although the swimming governing body FINA now accepts that he cheated by accident.
At the 2014 Chinese swimming championships, Sun tested positive to Trimetazidine, a heart stimulant that was only added to the banned list four months earlier.
Sun’s case was heard by the Chinese Swimming Federation, and they actually found him guilty. But they accepted his explanation that Trimetazidine was an ingredient in a medication he had been previously prescribed by an independent doctor for a genuine heart condition. In fairness, the explanation sounded plausible enough, and the peak doping body WADA reviewed and accepted the finding that Sun’s doping was accidental.
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It is in relation to the fresh charges that Sun has hanging over his head where things start to get really sketchy.
Say what you like about Shane Warne’s dear old mum, who infamously copped the rap after she inadvertently slipped a proscribed diuretic to the spin king which saw him rubbed out of cricket for a year in 2003. Sun Yang’s mother is in a league of her own when it comes to the doping question.
Sun is facing extraordinary claims that last year he and his mother conspired to destroy and hide blood samples during a late-night visit by independent drug testers while he was competing in the Zhejiang Province.
International Doping Tests and Management, contracted by FINA, arranged to visit Sun at the Athletes Village on the evening of September 3 to collect out-of-competition blood and urine samples to test for performance enhancing substances.
He wasn’t there when the doping officers arrived, and turned up hours later with several family members, including his mother Ming Yang, and started arguing with the officers, saying they were not authorised to conduct the tests. He finally gave a blood sample at 11.35pm but refused to provide a urine sample, with the standoff continuing until his personal doctor Ba Zhen arrived at 1am and declared the doping officers had no right to take any of the samples.
The 59-page FINA report says the officers then “heard the sound of glass breaking” and went outside to find a guard crouched in the dark using a hammer to smash the blood vials, with Sun standing by “using his phone as a flashlight”.
His mum then helped with the clean-up, with the report stating that at 3.15am, Ming Yang collected all the “used and unused materials from the testing session, including damaged and used blood tubes, needles and the shredded doping control form and left the clubhouse”.
Now, a lawyer might describe all this as circumstantial, and Sun is obviously entitled to a fair hearing, but there isn’t a single part of the above that sounds like anything other than a completely shameless attempt at a cover-up.
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We have been here before in sport, obviously, be it the pathetic excuses we have heard from so many cyclists, or the laughable claims from the likes of Maria Sharapova about her use of the banned drug Meldonium on the questionable grounds that she was worried she might develop diabetes one day.
To that end, it’s completely understandable that a straight-shooting bloke like Mack Horton would want to take a stand by refusing to stand next to Sun.
The nature of the vitriol he has sustained since is a pretty compelling insight into the collectivist mindset and unyielding respect for authority that makes China what it is.
The abuse sustained by Horton across Chinese social media, albeit worded in quaintly-constructed and often-comical English, has been intense and sustained, and reflects a Chinese rage towards any form of western judgmentalism. It is the sporting equivalent of Beijing bristling at criticisms over Tibet, the treatment of the Uyghurs, the democracy protests in Hong Kong, or the appalling recent comments by the Defence Minister Wei Fenghe that the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre was the “correct policy” to ensure stability.
By refusing to stand next to Sun, the ripples from Mack Horton’s actions may ultimately extend well beyond the pool.
Originally published as David Penberthy: Hey China, we reserve the right to call out cheats
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