Why the China doping scandal has created a crisis of faith and suspicion

In a month from now, Australia’s best swimmers will take to the pool vying to qualify for Australia’s Olympic team.

Swimming is straightforward. Swim fast enough, you qualify. Three quarters of Olympians don’t go to a second Olympics. It’s difficult to comprehend how it feels: a life’s effort for that moment, depending on a singular effort.

Water seeks its own level. So does talent. And so, again, does trust. Do you suppose Australia’s 50 or so swimmers, excellent enough to clamber onto the blocks at Paris 2024, should trust in “the system”? Should they believe their fellow competitors are, rightfully, crouched there next to them?

Let’s not pull punches. In January 2021, 23 athletes were subject to doping control procedures that resulted in each of their urine samples testing positive – some athletes failed more than once – for the presence of the prohibited substance trimetazidine (TMZ).

The fact those athletes never faced any sanction is quite something. It’s hard to see how any swimmer can have faith in the system.

The Chinese Olympic team for the Tokyo Games included 30 or so swimmers, many of whom were among the cohort of 23 athletes who tested positive the previous January. Some of those swimmers won Olympic medals. Some of those swimmers will compete in Paris.

Doping suspicions persist in the pool.Credit: Simon Letch

Those Chinese athletes shouldn’t have been in Tokyo unless they’d been deemed innocent by a proper and independent tribunal process. All of them should otherwise have been provisionally suspended as a protective measure, to protect clean sport. None of that happened.

Any athletes competing at a level more serious than recreation know they alone are responsible for whatever is detected in their samples. Athletes can’t delegate to another person their job of knowing the rules – of knowing what’s banned.

There’s one fact that arouses suspicion regarding those 23 athletes and them never having to answer at all for testing positive. They come from China, and we can’t know what happens behind the communist veil of that country.

That it’s taken three years and a joint German ARD-New York Times investigation to reveal that 23 athletes tested positive to TMZ is alarming. That nobody would’ve been any the wiser without that reporting should be the cause for far greater concern.

That none of these athletes faced even the mildest of cross-examination, let alone any penalty, represents all the proof to conclude that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in the systemic doping of athletes. But the real issue is “the system”.

Russian ice-skater Kamila Valieva.Credit: Getty

We are told there were traces of TMZ in the spice jars in the athletes’ hotel, remnants in the extraction fans above the cooktop, and in the drains as well. Of course there were. This is the same prohibited substance Chinese swimmer Sun Yang tested positive for in 2014, the same substance young Russian ice-skater Kamila Valieva tested positive to and is serving a four-year ban over. It’s always an accident, though …

That the Chinese Ministry of Public Security – an organ of the CCP, and thus maybe lacking an element of true independence – investigated and concluded contamination to be the cause of the 23 athletes testing positive shouldn’t surprise ... should it?

If the same kind of catastrophe befalls Australian athletes at the Olympic trials in Brisbane next month, won’t ASIO spring to action? That’d be enough – secret law-enforcement deployment, as a method of clearing athletes, must now be sufficient for the World Anti-Doping Agency’s requirements.

It’s best to not analyse matters through the prism of the nationality of the athletes; that cheapens the reasoning. But on the issue of heightened suspicion because of these athletes being Chinese, who’d actually blame you.

The last 60 or more years of Olympic sport represents a train wreck of one doping scheme after another. The East German machine destroyed the lives of thousands of its own athletes, and the aspirations of countless others from Australia and elsewhere.

In the past decade, it’s been definitively proven that Russia does not take WADA’s Anti-Doping Code as a body of rules dictating what’s unlawful in sport.

As for the Chinese, it’s hard to unsee the images of Chinese female swimmers circa the mid-1990s walking around the pool deck with their inverted triangle physiques and domineering swagger. Also, many of the architects of the GDR machine moved to China after the Berlin Wall crumbled.

It must be traumatic for any athlete to discover, three years on, that they competed in Tokyo against athletes who, very likely, shouldn’t have been there.

The understandable apprehended bias against believing Chinese athletes – and Russians – play fair is jet fuel on the bonfire of suspicion. The more basic conundrum is that it’s difficult to maintain faith that the systems designed to protect clean athletes are fastidiously adhered to.

The basic problem is that from the time the 23 Chinese athletes tested positive for TMZ, all that occurred seems positively arse-about. Accordingly, it’s problematic to recommend that any athlete should have faith.

TMZ is a metabolic modulator substance, prohibited for all athletes, at all times, both in competition and out of competition. TMZ isn’t a “specified substance”, identified under the WADA Code to be a substance more likely to be legitimately used by an athlete for a purpose other than enhancing sport performance. TMZ isn’t approved in Australia for therapeutic use, such are its possible side effects. TMZ does aid greatly, though, in boosting an athlete’s endurance.

Once the China Anti-Doping Agency received the 28 positive test results from 23 different athletes, CHINADA was compelled to take certain steps. Those steps aren’t optional. Specifically, under its WADA-compliant anti-doping rules, CHINADA was required, at a minimum, to undertake a results-management process consistent with WADA’s International Standard for Results Management.

Chinese swimmer Sun Yang.Credit: AP

Stopping there, the process of results management definitely isn’t to engage the Chinese secret police to spray luminol around the kitchen in the athletes’ hotel, two months after the fact, spying for trace levels of TMZ in every orifice.

Instead, results management involves (a) inquiring whether any athlete held a therapeutic use exemption for TMZ; and (b) considering if WADA’s international standards for testing, sample collection and laboratory standards were met in all the circumstances.

If nothing adverse or evidentially peculiar arises in those contexts, the processes of results management demand the athlete(s) to be notified of the adverse analytical findings. They should also be given specified information about the testing of B-samples and about providing substantial assistance in return for a possible reduction in any sanction that might ultimately be imposed.

At that same point, CHINADA was required to give – to WADA and World Aquatics – copies of any communications given to affected athletes.

But even more importantly, at the end of the results-management process, it is mandatory that the athletes be provisionally suspended pending a final determination of the case brought against each of them on the back of them testing positive for the presence of a prohibited substance.

Provisional suspensions are a protective measure; suspension in the absence of determined guilt, so fair competition can proceed while a proper process plays out for the suspended athlete.

The sum of there being no provisional suspensions, an absence of transparency, and a blind acceptance of the Chinese secret police’s conclusions that the 23 athletes were the unwitting victims of a chef’s mistake, must lead to the conclusion that no fair-playing athlete should have much faith in the system.

Perhaps each athlete would have been able to lead a cogent legal defence under the anti-doping rules based on their food being contaminated. Perhaps that defence would’ve succeeded. Maybe, though, proving contamination wouldn’t have worked out any better than it did for the countless athletes who’ve argued the same defence before.

The problem is we’ll never know. And we’ll never know whether we should’ve had faith in the system or not. Now we’ll just suspect the Chinese. WADA must do much better.

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