Sun Yang legal bill: WADA paid $830,000 in landmark doping case
The staggering legal bills involved in the fight to see drug cheat Sun Yang banned from swimming have been revealed, with a twist regarding who forked out the cash in the case.
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The legal fees that led to the banning of Chinese swim cheat Sun Yang have been revealed for the first time – and there’s a twist about who effectively ended up paying the eye-watering bill.
Buried on page 93 of its just published annual report for 2019, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has confirmed that it spent in excess of $830,000 on its landmark case against Sun after he flew into a rage and destroyed his own vial samples with a hammer before they could be tested for drugs.
Sun thought he got away with it after swimming’s world governing body let him off with a warning but after the details of his boorish actions were leaked, WADA appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland and the judges promptly threw the book at him.
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Held in public and live streamed around the world, Sun’s case took less than one day to be heard as WADA’s gun lawyers, led by Richard Young, the same anti-drugs crusader who brought down Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones, destroyed Sun’s bogus claims that he was standing up for the rights of athletes by refusing to co-oporate with the drug testers.
For advocates of clean sport – particularly Mack Horton who refused to join Sun on the medal podium at last year’s world swimming championships in protest at the sport’s lax approach to catching cheats – the astronomical legal bill was worth every cent when China’s national hero was kicked out of the sport for his second doping offence.
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But one of the other golden nuggets that was published in WADA’s annual report was a breakdown on how the agency is funded – and the biggest single contributor in the same year Sun went down – was the Chinese government, which chipped in $1.3 million.
The government’s contributions won’t cover Sun’s own fees and the disgraced freestyler faces the prospect of digging deep into his own pockets after hiring a high-powered legal team in an appeal to the Swiss Federal Court – his last chance to save his career.