After it was discovered in April that 23 of China’s top swimmers had tested positive for banned substances just months before the last Summer Olympics, China and international anti-doping agencies strongly defended their decision to allow them to compete in the 2021 Olympics. China and international anti-doping agencies maintained the athletes had not doped.
But even as they made those claims, China and anti-doping agencies were aware that three of the 23 swimmers had tested positive for other performance-enhancing drugs several years earlier and had avoided disclosure or suspension, according to a confidential report reviewed by The New York Times.
In both cases, China claimed the athletes had taken banned substances unknowingly, but some anti-doping experts are highly skeptical of that explanation.The two cases have deepened long-standing suspicions among rival athletes about a pattern of doping in China and what they see as an unwillingness or inability of the global authority, the World Anti-Doping Agency, to address it.
The three Chinese swimmers found to have tested positive in 2016 and 2017 were not your average swimmers. Two won gold medals at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, and the third is the current world record holder. All three are expected to compete for medals again at the Paris Olympics in July.
Anti-doping experts say if Chinese authorities and WADA had followed existing rules with both positive tests, the athletes would have been made public, subject to further scrutiny and potentially even disqualified from the 2021 Olympics, or even the Games that open in Paris next month.
“The athletes we spoke to are appalled by the anti-doping system and by WADA,” said Rob Kahler, executive director of the athletes’ rights group Global Athletes. “Athletes are expected to adhere to anti-doping rules to the letter, but the organizations that hold them accountable don’t have to.”
In a statement to The New York Times, WADA confirmed that three Chinese swimmers tested positive for “trace amounts” of the banned substance clenbuterol. WADA blamed the 2016 and 2017 cases on “widespread” food contamination. WADA published a lengthy response online at the same time as it emailed it to The New York Times.
“The contamination issue is real and well known in the anti-doping community,” WADA Director General Olivier Niggli said.
“The three athletes in question are elite-level swimmers who were frequently tested in countries where clenbuterol contamination of meat is widespread, so it would not be surprising if they were among the hundreds of athletes who tested positive for traces of the substance.”
WADA said the athletes’ clenbuterol levels were “six to 50 times lower than lowest reported levels,” but neither WADA nor Niggli offered any explanation for why they had not publicly disclosed that the athletes had clenbuterol in their systems.
Swimming’s world governing body, World Aquatics, also confirmed on Friday that three Chinese swimmers had previously tested positive for clenbuterol.
“We can confirm that there have been positive tests for clenbuterol involving Chinese athletes in 2016 and 2017,” the organization said in a statement. The organization, formerly known as FINA, said it had found records of the positive tests in its archives from a time when it had different management.
“If any information comes to light which suggests these cases should have been dealt with differently, we will of course consider it very carefully,” the organization said, adding that it would publish the results of its doping audit review in the coming weeks, including “clear guidelines on how similar cases should be dealt with in the future.”
Details of the positive tests from 2016 and 2017 were contained in a confidential report prepared by China’s anti-doping authorities, which was used to exonerate 23 swimmers in 2021 and submitted to WADA at the time.
China alleged in its report that the 23 swimmers were unknowingly contaminated with a heart drug that was somehow contained in the food prepared for them at a domestic tournament, basing its theory on the claim that two months after the positive tests, Chinese investigators found traces of the drug trimetazidine, known as TMZ, in the kitchen of the hotel where the swimmers were staying.
TMZ, which helps increase athletes’ stamina and endurance and speeds recovery time, belongs to the category of performance-enhancing drugs that carry the harshest penalties.
To bolster its case that contamination is real, the Chinese document cited other “mass incidents” in which 12 Chinese water polo players and 13 other athletes were unknowingly contaminated with banned drugs through food they ate. Among those previous cases, China said, were three top swimmers who tested positive for clenbuterol in 2016 and 2017.
But China’s citations of past cases only deepened questions about its history of responding to positive cases.
Under established testing procedures at the time, even if the results were thought to be due to contaminated meat, China and WADA should have made the identities of the athletes public and investigated the source of the contamination — a step that never appears to have been taken in any of the cases documented by China.
Clenbuterol has long been popular among athletes for its ability to reduce weight and promote muscle growth, and its performance-enhancing effects have led WADA to include it in the category of drugs carrying the toughest penalties, including a four-year ban from competitive play.
At the same time, it is also used to promote the growth of livestock in some parts of the world, which has led to a series of contamination cases in athletes who ate meat from animals that had been treated with the drug, a phenomenon detailed by China’s anti-doping agency in a presentation that is still available on the WADA website.
The China Anti-Doping Agency did not respond to questions from The Times.
WADA is tasked with protecting athletes from countries that are unable to police them for doping, but in 2021 it simply believed Chinese authorities when they said 23 swimmers had done nothing wrong. WADA did not conduct its own investigation inside China, and China’s anti-doping agency, the China Anti-Doping Agency, circumvented rules and procedures that other agencies are required to follow to get the athletes off the hook.
WADA’s inaction, citing COVID-19 restrictions, paved the way for China to send 23 swimmers to the 2021 Summer Olympics, where nearly half the team was made up of the swimmers who TMZ reported tested positive, and where Chinese swimmers who tested positive won medals in five events, including three gold medals.
After the revelations, both WADA and swimming’s governing bodies announced they would review their handling of the case, but that only raised new concerns. WADA, already under fire from athletes and coaches, was forced to address allegations that its handpicked prosecutor lacked independence, while World Aquatics was accused by a member of its anti-doping advisory group of being “inexplicably and forcibly excluded” from the review.
Amid the outcry, WADA officials have sought to defend themselves in a variety of public and private briefings, including conference calls with journalists, forums with hundreds of athletes and hastily scheduled video calls with board members.
During one of those calls, WADA’s general counsel, Ross Wenzel, looked directly into the computer camera and told executive board members there had been no doping by Chinese athletes.
It’s unclear how much Wenzel knew about the details of the China Doping Control Committee report shared with WADA, but he and other WADA officials have repeatedly supported their decision to exonerate the athletes, pointing to compelling statistics. Wenzel told board members that not a single Chinese athlete had tested positive for doping despite “significant, if not extensive, testing” in the three years prior to the 2021 incident.
During meetings in April and early May, Wenzel did not disclose the doping records of athletes prior to 2018. But WADA, which received China’s confidential report in 2021, has known for years that China had exonerated three athletes who tested positive for clenbuterol in 2016 and 2017.
China even revealed the names of three athletes in its report: Wang Shun, who became just the second Chinese man to win an individual gold medal in swimming at the Tokyo Olympics; Qin Haiyan, the current world record holder in the 200-meter breaststroke; and Yang Junxuan, who was 14 or 15 years old at the time of his positive test in 2017 but went on to win gold and silver medals at the Tokyo Olympics.
In April, Yang set a Chinese national record in the women’s 100-meter freestyle.
As WADA noted in a statement on Friday, the problem of Clenbuterol positive results eventually became so common that WADA changed its guidelines in 2019. The drug remains prohibited and in the category with the harshest penalties, but the bar for a positive result has been raised.
Still, WADA rules and procedures at the time required that athletes claiming to have been contaminated by clenbuterol be identified and provided evidence that the food they ate was indeed contaminated — a high hurdle that many athletes failed to meet, often resulting in multi-year bans.
But even if Chinese athletes could prove they were contaminated, under rules implemented in 2016 and 2017, WADA regulations required the China Anti-Doping Agency to make public their positive tests. And if an athlete tested positive during a competition, the result would be erased from the official record.
But in the case of the three Chinese swimmers, there is no evidence that China’s anti-doping agency followed those rules, and there are no public records to show the athletes tested positive.
The Chinese timeline shows the athletes’ positive tests in 2016 and 2017 came at a time when the country had previously faced allegations that its swimmers were doping with impunity.
In 2016, The Times of London cited a Chinese whistleblower as reporting that Chinese authorities had concealed five positive doping tests because they wanted to avoid making them public before qualifying for that year’s Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
The day after the London Times article was published, China’s anti-doping agency publicly acknowledged that six of its swimmers had tested positive for banned substances. The agency said the first positive tests were for clenbuterol, six months earlier in 2015. China declined to disclose other drugs or the names of the swimmers.
At the time, WADA was embroiled in a separate scandal involving Russia’s state-sponsored doping program. WADA responded quickly, describing the allegations about the Chinese nationals’ positive tests as “very serious” and vowing to address the situation “head-on,” but no formal action is known to have been taken.
Global athlete Kehler, who served as WADA’s vice-president until 2018, said the revelation of further hidden positive tests and the prospect of some of the athletes involved competing for medals at the Paris Games is something that other Olympians can hardly comprehend.
“This is going to send athletes’ trust in the system to an all-time low. I didn’t think that was possible,” he said.
