Phelps and fellow former four-time gold medalist Allison Schmidt have regularly taken drug tests and certified they are clean. Schmidt said she and other U.S. female swimmers “went smearing with their pants down to their knees, their shirts up to their chests, [drug testers] Watch the pee come out.”
“That’s what we signed up for,” she added, “and that’s what we’ll continue to fight for, for this clean sport.”
Phelps declared himself one of the most tough-tested U.S. Olympians ever.
“If you’re the only one doing it and everyone else isn’t, then you’re doing it wrong,” he said.
The overnight hearing, held to fit the tight schedules of both athletes and some of the committee members, was part of an effort by the United States Anti-Doping Agency to withhold some of the $3.7 million the U.S. pays in financial support to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) until WADA releases information from a report submitted by Chinese doping officials in 2021. Several committee members said they supported withholding the funds to WADA, but that was not the committee’s responsibility and doing so would take months.
USADA CEO Travis Tygart, one of WADA’s fiercest critics, also testified, urging Congress to challenge a system in which WADA’s relationship with the International Olympic Committee has made it “a lapdog rather than a watchdog.”
Officials from WADA, which appointed an independent prosecutor to investigate the China tests, did not attend the hearings despite being invited by the committee. WADA officials have repeatedly said there was insufficient evidence to dispute China’s anti-doping authorities’ findings that 23 positive tests for the drug trimetazidine were accidental, and that they were unable to investigate directly because of pandemic restrictions in China at the time.
“Although there are persistent allegations in some quarters in the United States that WADA has somehow been improper or shown bias against China, there is no evidence to support those claims,” WADA president Witold Banka said in a statement.
He added that the 23 positive tests have become a “hotly politicized issue” in the US.
“WADA understands the tensions that exist between the governments of China and the United States and has no authority to take sides there,” Banka continued in the statement.
