Prescription heart medication. Residues in the cooker hood and spice containers. Evidence collected by China’s security service.
The World Anti-Doping Agency, Wada, which is responsible for international doping control, has not been the target of such a heavy robbery in a while.
The reason is the group of top Chinese swimmers, which would not have come to light without the revelations of investigative journalists. The German channel ARD and the US newspaper The New York Times reported last week that 23 Chinese swimmers gave a positive doping sample before the Tokyo Olympics. The qualified Chinese swimmers were allowed to participate in the Tokyo Olympics and won, among other things, three gold medals.
China’s national anti-doping agency Chinada considered that the country’s athletes did not commit a doping violation. The World Anti-Doping Agency Wada accepted Chinada’s report. In the eyes of many, it does not stand the light of day, because the alleged evidence was collected only by the Chinese security service.
The Security Service and Chinada could not tell the origin of the banned substance, but Wada still swallowed the explanation.
– This mess is hard to understand, the chief architect of the ARD documentary, a journalist who exposed numerous doping rings and corruption cases Hajo Seppelt says to Urheilu.
ARD announced a 40-minute documentary on the subject, which caused anti-doping groups to heat up. CEO of USADA, the US anti-doping agency Travis Tygart described Wada’s actions as a stab in the back of clean athletes.
Tygart’s exit prompted Wada to hold a nearly two-hour long press conference, but its announcement did not calm the storm. Vice versa.
After Wada’s press conference, Usada released a statement in which it called on the countries of the world to come together to investigate Wada’s actions.
Seppelt and Tygart are not alone in their criticism of Wada. The duo has received support from Wada’s former chairman From David Howman and several other high-profile anti-doping bodies. It is a sensitive topic due to the upcoming Paris Olympics in August.
How did Wada’s current management end up losing the trust of significant parties? And has the trust gone irrevocably?
Allegation of contaminated food
The saga begins in the city of Shijianzhuang, with a population of 11 million, in the beginning of 2021. Shijianzhuang, located 300 kilometers southwest of Beijing, was visited on the 1st-3rd. January, high-level national swimming competitions, in which the country’s sharpest top took part.
The editor of ARD’s Sportschau program received a contact from China at the end of 2021. According to the informant, four Chinese swimmers would have given a positive doping sample in the aforementioned games.
ARD investigated the matter and tried to get comments on the matter from, among others, Chinada and Wada. They refused to comment on ARD’s information.
The research breakthrough didn’t happen until the fall of 2023. At that time, a letter arrived at ARD’s office without the sender’s information. The letter contained Chinada’s report on the Shijianzhuang Games.
According to the report, there were not four but 23 Chinese swimmers who gave a positive doping sample. There were 28 positive samples in total, because five athletes gave two positive samples.
Banned trimetazidine was found in all positive samples. The substance is the same from which the Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva also failed in 2021. Valieva received a four-year doping sentence because Wada challenged the decision of the independent disciplinary committee of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, according to which Valieva was not guilty of doping. Like the Chinese swimmers, Valieva’s defense appealed to food contamination.
As in Valieva’s case, the Chinese swimmers were not penalized by the Chinada disciplinary body of China’s national anti-doping agency.
According to the alleged evidence, traces of trimetazidine would have been found in the hotel’s kitchen range hood, spice containers and drains. However, Chinada did not collect the alleged evidence. They were delivered by the Chinese security service, which had visited the hotel’s kitchen three and a half months after the Games.
Chinada takes 60 urine tests at the Shijianzhuang National Swimming Championships. The result is 28 positive tests belonging to 23 athletes.
The samples arrive at the Hebei Provincial Laboratory and Wada’s knowledge. Athletes are not placed on a temporary ban.
Swimmers compete in the Olympic qualifiers for China. At the same time, the security service is allegedly investigating the hotel’s kitchen three and a half months after the attacks.
Wada receives a report from Chinada that the Chinese Security Service has collected the evidence. Wada conducts its own research in Western countries. No action.
The Chinese win six Olympic medals in Tokyo, three of them gold. All gold medals have a swimmer or swimmers in the background who had given a positive doping sample in January.
The leader of Chinada fell silent
Chinada’s report does not answer fundamental questions.
How did the prescription medicine trimetazidine end up in the hotel kitchen and who was the medicine prescribed to? How was it possible to draw a conclusion about athletes’ contaminated food three and a half months after the tests in a place that is cleaned daily? And above all, why was the investigation not conducted by Chinada but by the Chinese Security Service?
Trimetazidine has appeared in Chinese swimming before. Three-time Olympic champion and 11-time world champion serving a long doping sentence Sun Yang kary for the first time in his career in 2014. Kary was from trimetazidine. Chinada did not inform about Sun’s proposal, but the information was leaked to the press. In 2020, Sun was banned for four years after he was caught sabotaging his doping test.
Chinada did not respond to ARD’s several inquiries about the Chinese swimmers.
In February 2024, ARD participated, like , in the Play The Game conference on sports politics in Trondheim, Norway. One of the participants in the meeting was Chinada’s general secretary Li Zhiquan.
The ARD documentary shows a scene filmed at the conference, where an ARD reporter approaches Li and asks for an interview. Li avoids the ARD reporter, who asks Li for two questions. Li refuses them and the suggestion to do the interview later. The female person traveling with Li appeals to the busy schedule of the Chinese.
Wada also remained silent on the case. Wada’s annual statistics list how many doping cases have occurred for each substance. In the 2021 statistics, the number of trimetazidine is reported as 37.
However, Wada has not agreed to tell ARD if the figure includes 23 Chinese swimmers.
Why is Wada silent about a mass cart of this size?
– My first reaction was surprise. After that, I became worried, having worked as Wada’s general secretary from 2003 to 2015 David Howman said in the ARD documentary after examining the documents presented to him by the channel.
Howman wondered how Wada could have relied on alleged evidence collected by China’s security service and not conducted its own investigations.
– In such cases, you cannot rely solely on the report. The study should also be published for the sake of transparency, Howman said.
Wada has referred to special circumstances in its actions. At the beginning of 2021, there was a partial Lockdown in the Shijianzhuang area due to the corona pandemic.
This is what Wada explained
On Monday, the World Anti-Doping Agency Wada organized a press conference that lasted more than an hour and a half remotely. In it, its managers and experts shed light on their activities, and journalists could ask questions.
– Wada followed all the rules and carefully investigated every lead. If we were to do this investigation again, we would do everything the same, Wada Chairman Witold Banka said, referring to the pandemic conditions prevailing in 2021.
Wada’s medical director by Olivier Rabin according to Chinada, the report on food contamination is credible. According to Rabin, the mutual trimetazidine concentrations of the Chinese swimmers were in the same category and significantly lower compared to normal trimetazidine levels.
According to Rabin, five athletes gave two positive doping samples in three days. Two swimmers provided three samples with results varying between positive and negative.
– These variable results were not compatible with intentional ingestion. Not even microdosing, Wada’s head of legal Ross Wenzel stated.
Wada’s task is to supervise the activities of anti-doping agencies. In doping cases, decisions on punishing or not punishing an athlete are made by the person ordering the test. Outside of prestigious competitions, it is often the national anti-doping office – in the case of Chinese swimmers, Chinada.
However, Wada can challenge the test orderer’s decision and refer it to the International Court of Appeal for Sport, CAS. This is how Wada acted in Valieva’s case, for example, but not in Chinada’s case.
According to Wenzel, according to the anti-doping regulations, Wada had no obligation to make the case of the Chinese swimmers public because it and China’s national anti-doping agency Chinada did not end up accusing the athletes of a doping violation.
– If there is no decision on the violation, it is not mandatory to make it public. Since Chinada chose not to press charges, neither it nor Wada had grounds to make the matter public. If Wada had published the matter, it would have violated its own rules and privacy protections, Wenzel said.
According to Wenzel, Wada plans to investigate the comments made based on the ARD documentary and The New York Times article for possible legal action.
– The comments that hinted at the cover-up of doping cases for political reasons could not be further from the truth, Wenzel said.
On Monday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry also broke the silence.
– Chinada investigated the case comprehensively and thoroughly in 2021. It concluded that the positive samples were the result of contaminated food eaten by the athletes. The Chinese swimmers in the case were not the culprits and have not used doping, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Wang Wenbin said.
The United States knocked out
The turmoil did not subside after Wada’s press conference.
The next day, the United States Anti-Doping Agency, USADA, issued a statement calling on other nations to demand an external investigation and oversight of Wada’s actions.
Why didn’t Wada do their own research at the hotel? How did Preseptiläke end up in the hotel kitchen? How is it possible that in the daily cleaning procedures of the pandemic period, there is residue left on the cooker hood and spice containers, which are found more than a hundred days later? Why didn’t Wada and Chinada warn other anti-doping officials about this kind of contamination? And had the parties handling Valieva’s doping treatment been told about this possibility of contamination?
Among other things, Usada raised these questions in his letter.
Has credit to Wada gone for good? In order for the situation to change for the better, Seppelt calls for transparency.
– If I were in Wada’s position, I would cooperate more than before in the future. Chairman Witold Banka has refused all interviews with ARD for two years. The reason Wada has said is that our reporting is biased. Maybe so. We are investigative journalists whose job it is to catch grievances – whether it’s allegations or clear abuses.
– We don’t swallow PR explanations, but we want to find out the root of things as best we can. It seems to me that such an action is unusual for them (Wada). Even when we investigated the Russian doping scandal, many people did not like our actions, journalist Seppelt concludes.
In the following weeks, the field of anti-doping operators is expected to be very tense, as there are less than a hundred days left until the start of the Paris Olympics.