With the Paris Olympics weeks away, China’s swimmers have been caught up in the latest state-sponsored doping scandal.
The schemes may change, from the East German steroids of 50 years ago to the recent Russian mass urine-test falsifications, but the corrosive, demoralizing effect on clean athletes never changes. After years of training and intrusive testing, clean American swimmers find themselves competing against Chinese athletes who used performance-enhancing drugs.
“We have to pull our shorts below our knees and our shirts up to our chests,” Allison Schmitt, a ten-time Olympic swimming medalist, said as she described the testing to the House committee investigating the Chinese doping, “while someone bends over and watches the pee come out.” Michael Phelps, a 23-time swimming gold medalist, testified that he had as many as 150 such intrusive drug tests in a year, more than entire national teams, and often had to provide four to six vials of blood.
A New York Times investigation recently revealed that, just before the 2021 Tokyo Games, 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive during a domestic meet for a heart medication called trimetazidine, or TMZ, which is banned from competition as a performance-enhancing drug.
After waiting two months, the Chinese anti-doping agency disclosed the tests to the World Anti-Doping Agency but claimed that the athletes had unknowingly ingested TMZ while eating dinner at a Chinese hotel. The Chinese agency did not explain how a prescription-only drug in pill form appeared in meals eaten by a staggering number of elite swimmers.
Both the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Chinese anti-doping agency are supposed to follow a strict liability regime, even in cases of alleged accidental contamination. Athletes are responsible for what medications they use and what they eat. This is why, for example, Allison Schmitt gave up topical creams and oral medications to avoid an unintended positive test.
Further, China’s agency was obligated under international rules to immediately publicly disclose the positive tests, identify the swimmers and provisionally suspend them, pending an investigation of whether the athletes had intentionally ingested TMZ. When the Chinese agency failed to follow these procedures, the World Anti-Doping Agency should have intervened and appealed to the Court of Arbitration in Sport, especially since a Chinese whistleblower, now living in Germany, had previously reported that the Chinese government was giving its athletes the banned drug.
The World Anti-Doping Agency’s inaction was inexplicable, because it had filed just such an appeal when the Russian anti-doping agency failed to act in the identical case of Kamila Valieva, a Russian Olympic figure skater who tested positive for TMZ. (She claimed that her grandfather’s TMZ pill had gotten into her strawberry dessert.) The Court of Arbitration in Sport stripped Valieva of the gold medal she had won at the 2022 Winter Games.
By not intervening in the case of the 23 Chinese swimmers, the agency allowed many to qualify for and compete in the 2021 Tokyo games, where several won gold medals. Eleven of the 23 swimmers will be competing in the Paris Olympics. There is no evidence that China bribed the World Anti-Doping Agency, but winning Olympic medals is a geopolitical priority in China, and over the last five years China has paid the agency an extra $1.8 million above its required dues.
The agency denied any wrongdoing. It has retained a Swiss attorney to conduct an investigation, but it has not committed to publicly release his findings. Travis Tygart, the head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, has called the investigation a “whitewash.”
The World Anti-Doping Agency’s failure to do its job could have dire implications for the future of the Olympics. As Michael Phelps warned, without competitive integrity, someday “the Olympic Games might not even be there.”
Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”