It’s been a week since the New York Times and German TV channel ARD broke the news that 23 Chinese swimmers had tested positive for traces of the banned performance-enhancing drug TMZ in the run-up to the last Olympic Games. The ripples we’ve seen since then are just the visible tip of a wave of feeling flowing through the sport.
Most of it lies beneath the surface, where there is widespread anger, annoyance and disillusionment over the way the 23 were allowed to participate in the Games after an investigation by their national doping agency, Chinada, found the results were caused by contamination in the kitchen.
Three of them went on to win gold medals. One, Wang Shun, finished just 0.28 seconds ahead of Duncan Scott in the 200-meter individual medley. Both gentlemen are again among the favorites this year. “Give Slam his gold medal now,” Scott’s friend and teammate James Guy posted on X when the story broke (Slam is Scott’s nickname).
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Scott was among a group of swimmers who previously spoke out publicly about doping when he refused to shake hands with another Chinese swimmer, Sun Yang, at the 2019 world championships because Yang had his own doping case hanging over him. There is talk that more stage protests will take place in Paris.
It could get even hotter. Sun, who was previously suspended for three months after testing positive himself on TMZ, has only just completed a separate four-year ban. He has said he wants to compete in the Olympics. He missed the Chinese trials, which took place this week, but as long as he meets the qualifying time (and he says he has trained every day) he would be eligible for discretionary selection by the Chinese federation.
Guy is one of the few athletes who is willing to say in public what many people in swimming will only say in private. Sound carries over water and you don’t have to strain your ears to pick up the whispers on the pool deck. Athletes who have been told all their lives that they are strictly responsible for everything in their bodies have suddenly learned that they have had to deal with swimmers who were allowed to compete despite testing positive for trace amounts of TMZ. Both Chinada and the World Anti-Doping Agency were convinced they fell below the level at which they could be considered performance-enhancing – Chinese authorities said this meant intentional doping was “impossible”. However, questions remain about how exactly the contamination occurred.
Guy’s teammate Adam Peaty joined in, although his own comments about X focused on Wada’s handling of the case. Peaty publicly supported Scott’s protest in 2019. If he wants to win gold in Paris, he will have to beat one of the 23, Qin Haiyang, who won the three breaststroke events at the world championships in Fukuoka last year.
The story is not just about the athletes’ shaky faith in Wada’s ability to oversee their sport, or World Aquatics’ ability to run it, but also about the long and enduring, uneasy relationship between Chinese swimming and their competitors from all over the world. . This goes back to the late 1980s, before most of these swimmers were even born. At that time, a group of three coaches who had worked in East Germany’s state-sponsored doping regime were sent by their government to help establish new high-end training programs in China.
Over the next decade, Chinese swimmers won an unprecedented number of medals at major events, and also failed an unprecedented number of drug tests. More than half of all recorded doping cases in elite swimming in the 1990s involved Chinese swimmers. Seven of them came at one competition, the 1994 Hiroshima Asian Games. More should have followed at the 1998 Perth World Championships, when one of the team was caught smuggling thirteen vials of human growth hormone through customs. It was enough to supply the entire Chinese team, but only one swimmer and one coach were punished.
This went beyond the isolated doping cases that occurred in other countries and were limited to individual athletes or training groups. The World Swimming Coaches Association was so alarmed by the scale of the problem that it began calling on the sport’s governing body, then known as Fina, to take action. Fina was hopelessly clumsy at best and repeatedly resisted the suggestion that there was a problem. Members of the WSCA were told they were “paranoid” and described as “troublemakers”. Chinese officials accused them of Sinophobia and racism, hypocrisy and ignorance of Chinese swimming culture.
Expect the same arguments to be made again in the coming months, with particular emphasis on Western athletes’ widespread use of therapeutic use exemptions, which grant permission to use medically necessary performance-enhancing drugs. Australian coach Denis Cotterell, who lives in China, has already given an interview in which he explained that outsiders do not understand the team’s culture. Which may be true. As bioethicist Maxwell Mehlman wrote The price of perfection: “In effect, China has replaced East Germany as the target of Western condemnation of state-sponsored doping.” It was easy, Mehlman wrote, for the Western press to portray China as “the big red machine.”
Cotterell also spoke about the fear and sacrifices he said his swimmers had to make to avoid eating contaminated food. “People who come to China know that contamination is a problem,” he said. “It’s an unfortunate aspect of me being here… I’m happy to say I absolutely support my swimmers and dispute any suggestion of anything orchestrated.”
The Chinese press, meanwhile, simply paid no attention to the cases at all. In the 1990s it was often reported that the athletes who tested positive were simply injured. The swimmers were often completely unaware that they were committing doping violations, because they blindly followed their coaches and doctors. This lack of information left them almost surprised to discover that the wider community was so suspicious. Professors Haozhou Pu and Michael Giardina have convincingly argued that the Chinese authorities are actively fueling this persecution complex: “The importance of the Olympic Games for China is no longer limited to portraying an image of ‘victor’ to the world: paradoxically, it also functions for an autonomous ‘victim profile’ for Chinese citizens.”
You could see this in 2012, when 16-year-old Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen won the gold medal in the women’s 400-meter individual medley in a world record of 4 minutes and 28.43 seconds. It was a second faster than the old mark and a full five faster than her own personal best from before the race. No one had ever seen anything like her final 100m freestyle and that evening the Olympic village was humming with conversation about Ye’s achievement. There were plenty of people there who were happy to gossip about it, but only one, an American coach named John Leonard, was willing to go on the record.
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He told the Guardian that he found Ye’s performance literally incredible. “I use that word in its precise meaning. At the moment it is not credible for many people in swimming.” Ye denied doing anything wrong and described Leonard as “unprofessional.” He was pilloried on social media for expressing the same doubts that other coaches and athletes had. Ultimately, almost 150 athletes from the London Games were found guilty of doping violations and 42 athletes were stripped of their medals. You weren’t one of them.
Leonard was accused of hypocrisy, racism and bullying a 16-year-old girl. But his target wasn’t really Ye. He spoke from years of bitter experience in his sport. He fulfilled a promise he made to himself in the 1980s to speak up, when he had watched in suspicious silence as the East Germans systematically corrupted his sport. He was part of a generation that had fought and lost to painstakingly clean up the sport. They felt thwarted by what they perceived as a system staffed by too many weak and conflicted administrators, working for opaque and irresponsible governing bodies.
That was the last generation. The worry is that the latter will start to feel exactly the same.