Chinese checkers and the WADA cone of silence (2024)

The thing about a cover-up is that there’s nothing to see. It’s the smell that gives it away.

There might be a valid explanation for the fact that 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive to a banned drug before the Tokyo Olympics, but were not even provisionally suspended. There might be good cause for the World Anti-Doping Agency to have accepted China’s explanation about accidental mass contamination and negligible readings.

But that was early in 2021. Three years have elapsed without a word either from Chinese authorities or WADA, and the episode is only in the public domain now because of the painstaking work of investigative journalists at The New York Times.

WADA is not obliged to make public all that comes across its desk. But a question begs: if this was actually good news in the anti-doping vigil, the regime operating with nuance and sophistication, why would WADA as the great crusader for clean sport not have let the world know?

It’s impossible for noses not to wrinkle a little here.

Let’s be frank. We have preconceptions, and China has form. The turbulent life and times of Sun Yang, bete noire of Mack Horton, comes immediately to mind in this country. His drug of choice was TMZ, the drug in question in this case.

It was also a cousin of the drug that cost tennis star Maria Sharapova a long suspension in 2016 and several other eastern bloc athletes since. TMZ has been banned since 2014. It is a synthetic drug, so easily detected. Its effects are said to be short-lived. About that history, there is a certain whiff.

As per WADA protocol, the tests were conducted and logged by CHINADA, the Chinese agency, which militates against suspicion that this was the work of a state-run doping program.

The 23 positives were all recorded at the same time and place and traced to meals at a training camp, which is too wholesale and clumsy to fit into a conspiracy theory and lends itself to weight to the possibility of an unhappy accident. Traces were found of TMZ, but in such small quantities as unlikely to be performance enhancing.

That’s credible as far as it goes. But it doesn’t explain why the drug – devised as a medication for heart disease – was present at all in the training camp. And it doesn’t explain why details of this course of events, if so innocent, were buried away in archives unlikely to come again before human eyes, until they did.

It’s hard not to have to pinch your nose with your fingers now.

Then there’s the role of WADA, the international body. It accepted CHINADA’s explanation and did not insist even on provisional suspensions, as incurred by Australia swimmer Shayna Jack in 2019 after testing positive for a banned substance that she said she ingested unknowingly.

Jack was cleared by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to return to swimming two years later, but too late to make that year’s Tokyo Olympics. The 23 Chinese swimmers competed in Tokyo, and three won gold.

Anyone got any air freshener?

We’ve heard a lot in this country recently about the burden of proof. In defending its actions, WADA said it had no “scientific evidence and intelligence” to challenge China’s conclusions and was “not in a position to disprove the possibility that contamination was the source of TMZ”. In other words, it proceeded from a presumption of innocence.

But a distinctive feature of the anti-doping regime since it was formulated is so-called strict liability, which reverses the onus. Rather than obliging drug authorities to establish guilt, it demands that an athlete prove their innocence. Because of this, Jack was suspended. Despite this, two years later, the Chinese swimmers were not.

Won’t someone open a window, please?

And then WADA swept it all under the table anyway, transparency be damned. Even if there was nothing to see here, surely the worldwide anti-doping regulator had a duty to report that it had seen nothing? It is baffling that it has chosen to let this sleeping dog lie. Then again, China is a very big dog.

The thing about a bad smell is that sometimes it is only a fart. But it still needs to be cleared up.

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