Olympic careers are usually short. Athletes deserve to know they are clean

This time next week, the first wave from among almost 1000 swimmers will already have descended on Paris’ Olympic pool.

Every athlete will have trained for years, just for that moment in the spotlight. That fleeting instance, for most, will flame out within two minutes.

If that’s the tightrope you’re forced to traverse to chase your dream, it’s reasonable to expect the playing field to be flat.

The majority of swimmers will swim in one race. The statistic relating to the Olympic Games is this: three-quarters of Olympians never get the opportunity to compete at a second Games.

Because of this, we must demand the World Anti-Doping Agency be beyond excellent. Not a political morass. Not a quagmire of questionable competency and dubious decisions.

Lamentably, WADA isn’t excellent. Do you reckon World Aquatics has amped up the testing of Chinese athletes in 2024 for no reason? Do you reckon that testing every prospective Chinese aquatic Olympian for Paris 2024, no less than eight times since January, is undertaken randomly ?

CaptionCredit: Simon Letch

It’s because WADA is time zones departed from excellence. WADA has had 25 years, and hundreds of millions of dollars of government and Olympic movement money injected into it, with the sole intention that WADA becomes excellent at ensuring the playing field is dead level.

It’s had time to eliminate any doubt that sport is ridden of rampant, intentional and orchestrated cheating. For ensuring also, that sport is clean of doping that’s accidental or at least unintentional. If WADA doesn’t discharge that mandate, what’s the point of the Olympic Games? We may as well hand the baton to the Enhanced Games clown show.

Doping control testing is now more orchestrated, organised and sophisticated than what it was 25 years ago. The science of detection has evolved many times over; but so has the science of deception.

The bleak reality is that there’ll be athletes competing in Paris, across all sports, who’ve engaged in nefarious medical practices. They’ve just never been caught. For some, sure they’ve been detected; but nothing of note happened.

Chinese swimmer Sun Yang tested positive in 2014.Credit: AP

This is the fundamental reason why the recently-released interim report, into WADA’s handling of the matter of 23 Chinese swimmers, each of whom returned positive tests in 2021 for the presence of an obscure angina medication not even available for prescription in Australia, is so important.

Trimetazidine is prohibited in sport for a reason. TMZ has been banned for a decade or more because it’s recognised that the substance has the propensity to materially aid an athlete’s cardiac function under exertion.

Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva tested positive for TMZ before the 2022 Winter Olympics, at which she won a gold medal. Earlier this year, the CAS banned Valieva for four years. TMZ also was the substance which saw the Chinese distance swimmer Sun Yang fall foul of doping rules for the first time, in 2014. Contrastingly, and on the facts of his case, he was banned for three months, much to the chagrin of many fair-minded observers.

Placed into that context, two dozen Chinese athletes all testing positive at the same time (some of them tested positive on more than one day) for the presence of the same prohibited substance constitutes a calamitous chain of coincidences almost unheard of in sport.

‘The problem with all of this is that WADA’s decision-making turns on its head the concept of strict liability.’

The Chinese Anti-Doping Authority took no action to provisionally suspend, charge or sanction any of those 23 athletes. It’s practically never the case that athletes escape en masse in such circumstances after testing positive.

That CHINADA’s decision was dependent on investigations apparently undertaken by China’s equivalent of the KGB is unusual, to use a euphemistic term. That WADA never appealed against CHINADA’s decision, to not proceed against any athlete or any other person, demands that serious questions be asked.

That all of this was kept secret for three years and would have remained that way but for an investigation conducted by The New York Times, must distress every athlete in Paris who is honestly chasing their Olympic moment. WADA wouldn’t have had the fortitude to audit itself and its decision-making but for its secrets being revealed against its will.

WADA’s self-commissioned, “independent” investigation of itself – instigated after a stale light was shone on WADA’s processes – was set on a narrow track. WADA’s selected investigator, Eric Cottier, is a former attorney general of the Swiss canton of Vaud, and someone with professional links to WADA and the Olympic movement.

Although that actuality mustn’t be conflated with there existing any material conflict of interest, WADA could’ve gone to any number of esteemed retired jurists, in any number of jurisdictions, to conduct a comprehensive and entirely arm’s-length investigation. It didn’t.

But what WADA did next is alarming. WADA commissioned its investigation to address just two questions. First, was WADA’s decision-making infected by undue interference by, or a bias towards China? Second, did WADA make a reasonable decision, in not challenging the CHINADA decision to not bring anti-doping proceedings against the 23 athletes based on the “contamination hypothesis”?

In short, Cottier’s investigation failed to locate any evidence of bias, and he concluded that WADA’s decision to not appeal CHINADA’s determinations to the Court of Arbitration for Sport was an “indisputably reasonable” one.

The second-last page of Cottier’s short, seven-page “interim” report is devoted to a diatribe about the potential unfairness on the 23 Chinese athletes, had WADA appealed CHINADA’s decision so close before the Tokyo Olympics. Which is at least odd, given the contrasting potential for unfairness on all of their fellow competitors, forced to swim at those Games against Chinese athletes who should’ve been provisionally suspended and perhaps never in Japan in the first place.

In any case where an organisation commissions an independent investigation into itself, the answers are framed by the questions. Governments especially have mastered the art of this.

WADA didn’t ask the investigator whether:

It would have been reasonable for WADA to appeal in circumstances where there were 28 failed doping tests involving 23 athletes and where there weren’t any imperfections in the sample collection and testing processes. Though it might well be indisputably reasonable to not appeal; that does not mean that a decision to appeal would be unreasonable;

WADA faithfully and fearlessly enforced its own rules. WADA didn’t ask the investigator to draw any conclusions on whether CHINADA breached WADA’s anti-doping rules by reason of failing to provisionally suspend the 23 athletes; failing to issue anti-doping rule violations; failing to disqualify the 23 athletes’ results; and failing to make any public announcements about any aspect of this sorry episode;

It was correct to not provisionally suspend the 23 athletes pending an examination of CHINADA’s “contamination hypothesis” by independent sports jurists. WADA didn’t ask whether the “contamination hypothesis” is supported by cogent and probative evidence;

On the weight which should be given to the investigations undertaken by CHINADA and the State’s secret police noting that those investigations, centred on a hotel kitchen, began weeks after the athletes had departed, where thousands of meals were cooked in the intervening period.

The problem with all of this is that WADA’s decision-making turns on its head the concept of strict liability, and the immutable reality that an athlete is solely responsible for what enters their system.

The core problem for the honest athletes on the blocks in Paris, how can they be anything but blind to what they don’t know.

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