Mass doping uncovered in China
“Silence from top sports leaders is deafening”
April 24, 2024, 10:25 p.m
The World Anti-Doping Agency believes the Chinese Anti-Doping Agency that 23 positive tests in the Olympic swimming team can be explained by contaminated food. However, many experts do not trust this narrative – and sometimes even see the integrity of world sport threatened.
For US doping hunter Travis Tygart, “the leading forces in sport and the governments” as sponsors of WADA are also to blame for the credibility crisis in the global anti-doping fight. In an interview with “Spiegel” Tygart said: “The silence from the top of the sport when it comes to how worrying the current findings are is deafening.” The head of the US anti-doping agency USADA reiterated his call for a “general overhaul of WADA” because “the current case has shown once again that the global anti-doping system has failed athletes.”
The affair surrounding the positive doping samples of 23 swimmers from China before the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo, which did not result in any sanctions, shook world sport at the weekend. The New York Times and the ARD doping editorial team researched and published the case together. Since then, the World Anti-Doping Agency has been on the defensive.
She said in a statement that she had “acted with due care at every stage of this case and in accordance with the agreed procedure and the rules of the World Anti-Doping Code.” So far, “no one” has been able to provide evidence that would enable successful prosecution.
WADA believes the national anti-doping agency CHINADA and the Chinese authorities, whose investigation has revealed contamination in a hotel kitchen with the banned heart drug trimetazidine (TMZ). For Tygart, a “fairytale explanation”. CHINADA “sweeps 23 doping cases under the carpet – and WADA stands by and allows it to happen,” he said.
Tygart calls for a “real investigation.” The case hovers “like a dark cloud over the Olympics, the sport of swimming and the athletes who now know that they are competing against athletes who have tested positive and whose results have been kept secret until now,” he said.