Why a Chinese anti-doping scandal feeds doubts about Olympic swimming’s cleanliness

PARIS — At the heart of the anti-doping saga looming over the 2024 Olympics, and stoking a "fight" on the eve of the Games, is a mystery that might never be solved.

What we know is that, in 2021, 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for a banned substance and weren’t punished.

What we don’t know is how the substance, trimetazidine (TMZ), entered their bodies.

That is the gray area in which anti-doping officials have clashed in recent months. Chinese authorities and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) attributed the positive tests to contamination. But their extralegal, extraordinary decision to never publicly disclose the tests — until journalists exposed them in 2024 — led to suspicions and accusations of a cover-up.

Leading that crusade against WADA has been Travis Tygart, the outspoken CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA).

On Wednesday, after International Olympic Committee officials forcefully rebuked the U.S., and in response to an IOC power move designed to reinforce WADA's authority, Tygart raised the volume once again.

"WADA is just a sport lapdog," he said in a lengthy statement. "And clean athletes have little chance."

Less than 24 hours later, WADA president Witold Banka called his comments "unprofessional." Previously, he has labeled Tygart "defamatory" and "politically motivated." In an April interview with Yahoo Sports, he accused the USADA chief of “try[ing] to destroy the anti-doping system.” Tygart, when presented with the accusation, called it “baseless"; but he has consistently called for reform, and railed against WADA's lack of independence.

The two men and their organizations "have been playing a game of ping pong with media bullets," as U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee president Gene Sykes said Thursday. What they haven't done is actually talk to each other. They've hardly spoken since a 2020 meeting, at which Tygart felt that WADA's main goal was "to trap me into [agreeing] that I wouldn't say anything to the press about them without running it by them."

He has done just the opposite. He has issued scathing statement after statement. And does he ever pick up the phone to call WADA first?

"Never!" Banka said in April, as he lurched forward laughing.

So the rock-throwing has continued, right up until the start of these Olympics. The mystery, meanwhile, remains unsolved.

Nobody, to be clear, has explicitly accused the 23 Chinese swimmers of wrongdoing. “We don't know if it was intentional doping or contamination of some sort — because we don't have the file or the facts,” Tygart said this spring. And that, precisely, is the problem. Opacity has fed distrust. Unknowns linger. As the Games begin, swimmers were asked Thursday, have authorities given them confidence that the sport is clean and the proverbial playing field is level?

U.S. star Caeleb Dressel gave a blunt answer: "No. No, not really."

The following is an attempt to explain why.

The Chinese swimming case, explained in 1 minute

The positive tests stem from a domestic Chinese meet at the very start of 2021. Over two months later, the Chinese Anti-Doping Agency (CHINADA) privately reported the positives to swimming’s global governing body (now called World Aquatics) and later to WADA.

CHINADA did not, however, publicly disclose the positives and provisionally suspend the 23 swimmers, as WADA rules require. Instead, it commissioned an investigation, which concluded that the swimmers must have inadvertently ingested TMZ, a heart medication that can boost endurance.

WADA, despite doubts raised internally by its own top scientists, chose not to challenge CHINADA’s conclusion. Its leaders never even mentioned the case to the WADA executive committee or foundation board. The positives, therefore, stayed hidden for three years.

When the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD uncovered them in April, the revelations led to the spat between USADA and WADA, legal threats, and now a U.S. Department of Justice probe.

What was China’s explanation for the positive tests?

All 23 swimmers were staying at the same hotel. The Chinese investigation — led by China’s Ministry of Public Security, the law enforcement and intelligence arm of the Communist Party — supposedly found traces of TMZ in the hotel’s kitchen, including in spice containers and sink drains, months later.

Those traces supported CHINADA’s explanation that tiny amounts of TMZ had entered the swimmers’ bodies without their knowledge.

Is China’s ‘contamination’ excuse plausible?

The hotel-kitchen excuse has been widely ridiculed. “It's a fairy tale,” Tygart told Yahoo Sports in April. “It's literally Tinkerbell coming in and sprinkling magic fairy dust.”

Others have pointed out that the kitchen would’ve been cleaned countless times between the drug tests in early January and the discovery of TMZ that spring; and that Chinese authorities have never explained how TMZ got into the kitchen. Despite a presumably exhaustive search, they never found a hotel employee who was taking the heart medication, which comes in pill form.

On a conference call in April, Olivier Rabin, WADA’s science director, argued that “an individual who had been prescribed with [TMZ] … [c]ould have used it on site, in the restaurant.” He called contamination “quite possible” and “plausible” — “in particular if you crushed the pills, if you cut the pills, or for whatever reason if you put them in a liquid and let them dissolve before consumption.”

But behind the scenes, in 2021, Rabin had “doubts about the reality of contamination as described by the Chinese authorities,” a special prosecutor reviewing WADA’s handling of the case later found.

Another top WADA scientist, Irene Mazzoni, “express[ed] her difficulty in believing in the contamination due to the minimal doses found in the kitchen, which is moreover outside the food, two months after the competitions, without the origin of TMZ being identified,” the prosecutor wrote.

So why did WADA accept China’s explanation?

WADA essentially concluded that because it couldn’t disprove contamination, it couldn’t win an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

And scientifically, its top officials now argue, the relatively low levels of TMZ detected in the swimmers’ urine samples were consistent with unintentional use.

Taking the case to court also would’ve been procedurally cumbersome and inconvenient — with the Tokyo Olympics getting underway as WADA deliberated. (Of the 23 swimmers who tested positive, 13 were set to compete in Tokyo; two won gold medals.)

Did WADA ever investigate China?

No, not that we know of. In June and July 2021, WADA’s lawyers reviewed the case. Its scientists spoke with experts. But it didn’t send investigators to China. WADA officials have said that this “was not possible” due to "extreme" COVID-19-related restrictions at the height of the pandemic.

So, in July 2021, they chose not to appeal, and buried the case.

Once it reappeared in 2024, they appointed Swiss prosecutor Eric Cottier to review their own handling of it, but not China’s. Critics have called that review, outlined and paid for by WADA itself and limited in scope, a “whitewash.”

What are the main criticisms of WADA?

Narrowly, the chief complaint is that WADA didn’t enforce its own rules — which call for provisional suspensions and public disclosure even in cases of “no fault” — and didn’t examine Chinese swimming with more skepticism.

Tygart has said that “WADA allow[ed] China to sweep 23 positive tests for a potent performance-enhancing drug under the carpet.”

More broadly, he and others have blasted WADA for being too tight with and beholden to the Olympic movement — which, as all this transpired, was preparing for Games in Tokyo (summer 2021) and Beijing (winter 2022).

OK, back up. What is WADA?

WADA is the global regulator of clean sport. It sets the anti-doping “code” by which all Olympic athletes must abide. It decides which substances should trigger what punishments. It then oversees a network of national anti-doping bodies, like USADA and CHINADA, that administer tests and police doping in their respective countries.

So what’s wrong with WADA and ‘the system’?

WADA was founded, in the late 1990s, by the International Olympic Committee. Then and now, it is governed and funded in part by the IOC and sports officials, in part by national governments. “It's heavily run by the sport movement,” Rob Koehler, an athlete advocate who worked at WADA from 2002-2018, told Yahoo Sports.

In its early years, critics say, WADA was functioning reasonably well and independently; then, in 2013, an IOC vice president, Craig Reedie, was elected WADA president. “And it became clear to us, in how WADA responded to issues, that the IOC was taking back WADA,” Tygart said. “Because WADA had got too independent.”

The Chinese swimming case, to many, reeked of that influence. When asked if WADA essentially made a “business decision” on behalf of the IOC, with an Olympics in China approaching, Tygart said: “I can assure you, the pressure you get to not do something that's gonna impact the brand of sport ... is tremendous.”

Did the IOC pressure WADA to sweep the China case ‘under the carpet’?

There’s no evidence of that. There are only suspicions, because the case was handled entirely behind closed doors.

In fact, multiple people familiar with the situation told Yahoo Sports that WADA leaders did not even brief their 16-member executive committee nor their 42-member foundation board, neither during deliberations nor after deciding not to appeal.

This, a mostly-overlooked aspect of the saga, “is quite incredible,” Clayton Cosgrove, who represented New Zealand on the WADA ExCo and board at the time, told Yahoo Sports. Given the potential magnitude of the case, Cosgrove said, “you would think that the executive [committee] would not only be notified, but they would be brought into the center of any discussions. To not notify the executive, I just found stunning, incredible, bizarre. In any other organization, if that were the case, heads would roll on the sawdust. And the CEO would be fired, or would do the right thing and resign.”

What is WADA’s excuse for the lack of transparency?

A WADA spokesman, when asked why the ExCo was not informed, wrote in an email that “WADA reviews in the region of 2,500-3,000 cases each year. … [The reviews are] a function of WADA management and it would not be expected — nor has it ever been asked — to outline each of those cases for members of the Executive Committee to review.”

Cosgrove and others responded to that statement with incredulity — because the Chinese case was “not just one or two dopers,” he explained; it should’ve been “mission-critical” to the organization.

At an extraordinary board meeting in May, Darren Mullaly, an Australian representative, pushed WADA on this point. “The executive committee and foundation board have been briefed in significant detail on other very sensitive cases in the past,” he said as he pressed for answers.

And here, via Zoom, WADA officials essentially conceded that the true reason was to keep the case private. “Certainly, if one were to provide information to the foundation board — and in reality, even to the executive board — there is of course a risk of that information becoming public,” Ross Wenzel, WADA’s general counsel, said. Director general Olivier Niggli added that transparency “had to be balanced, then, with the protection of the athletes. And the fact that you cannot ... allow for rumors, fake news, speculations to start spreading in the media.”

Which Chinese swimmers tested positive for TMZ?

Speculations, of course, ultimately spread like wildfire precisely because WADA had tried to keep them quiet. ARD published the names of all 23 swimmers. They include:

• Zhang Yufei, a then-23-year-old star who won gold in the 200-meter butterfly and silver in the 100 butterfly in Tokyo, and contributed to two medal-winning relays — one of which set a world record and beat a U.S. team that was also under previous world-record pace.

• Wang Shun, a veteran who won the 200-meter individual medley, and became the second Chinese male swimmer to win an individual Olympic gold.

• Qin Haiyang, who did not medal in Tokyo, but set a world record in 2023 in the 200-meter breaststroke.

All three could win more medals in Paris. Qin enters the 2024 Games as a favorite for at least one gold.

How are U.S. swimmers feeling entering these Olympics?

As the scandal rocked swimming throughout the spring, several U.S. swimmers, including Katie Ledecky, were left to wonder whether their Olympic races — back in 2021 and ahead in 2024 — were clean.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” Lilly King said ahead of U.S. trials, “for athletes to always have in the back of our mind that maybe this sport’s not fair.”

Nic Fink, who will battle Qin in the 100-meter breaststroke Sunday night, clarified, though, that frustrations are “not about any particular swimmers. It's more about the system.”

Has the system changed amid outcry? How has WADA responded?

Nope. WADA has responded to the outcry with threats, diversions and defensiveness. In a 20-minute interview with Yahoo Sports in April, Banka argued, repeatedly, that “we didn't do anything wrong. We didn't cover up anything. This is actually defamatory.”

At the May board meeting, Dick Pound, WADA’s founding president, went a step further. "On behalf of WADA, I am deeply disappointed and disgusted by the deliberate lies and distortions coming from USADA, including that WADA has swept doping cases in China under the rug,” he said. “That accusation, bereft of any truth, has but a single purpose: to deliberately damage the reputation of WADA, and to lessen worldwide trust that has been built up since WADA was created a quarter of a century ago.”

Pound, a Canadian, later continued: “USADA is financed by the United States government. That government is currently in a chilly relationship with China's government. Could there be a connection?”

He concluded by recommending that WADA “institute legal proceedings claiming significant damages against USADA, since there must be serious consequences arising from its outrageous conduct.”

How has China responded?

With a few statements echoing the “politically motivated” line, and decrying “fake news” — but primarily by censoring and scrubbing all discussion of the scandal from Chinese websites and social media platforms.

Are the Chinese swimmers in Paris?

Yes — 11 of the 23 will be in Paris.

To be clear, though: A majority of this year’s 31-member Chinese swim team, including a few medal contenders, were not among the 23 who tested positive three years ago.

Will they be subject to increased drug testing?

Interestingly, an anti-doping audit committee convened by World Aquatics in light of the China saga noted in a report earlier this month that Chinese swimmers would be tested “no less than eight times” by the third-party International Testing Agency in 2024 prior to the start of the Olympics.

Those eight-plus tests are at least twice as many as some other swimmers undergo. They’re in addition to any tests administered by CHINADA, and in addition to the standard post-race tests carried out at the Games. An ITA report released this week suggested that Chinese athletes, in general, have been tested as much as or more than athletes from any other country.

What’s next in the China case?

Earlier this month, WADA released an “interim report” from Cottier, the special prosecutor, who, as expected, cleared WADA of any mistakes or improprieties.

Cottier’s full report will be released at a later date. It’s unclear if any meaningful action will follow.

Meanwhile, all eyes are on a U.S. federal investigation. Under the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act — a groundbreaking 2021 U.S. law that WADA fought against — the FBI and other governmental agencies are allowed to prosecute international doping conspiracies. They probably can’t compel Bańka, who is Polish, or staff at Montreal-based WADA to testify; and they almost certainly won’t get cooperation from China. But they have subpoenaed the American executive director of World Aquatics, Brent Nowicki, as a witness.

Fears of further subpoenas or arrests led the IOC to pressure U.S. Olympic officials into amending Salt Lake City's host contract for the 2034 Winter Games. The amendment will be leverage in post-Paris surrounding the law, which Banka called an "obvious attempt to disharmonize the [global anti-doping] system."