Column: Lack of Transparency in Chinese Doping Tests a Glaring Failure of Anti-Doping Authorities
For a year in the middle of his career, Markus Thormeyer was essentially nowhere, by statutory requirement.
The Canadian Olympic swimmer tested positive for a banned substance on Jan. 19, 2022, in an out-of-competition urine test. He stood before a tribunal that October, after spending much of the year trying to prove his positive test was an accidental, “no significant fault or negligence” resulting from a contaminated water bottle that he had shared with another individual. In November, he was given a reduced 12-month suspension for a no-fault finding, back-dated to the testing date. In February 2023, with two weeks left on the suspension, news of his positive test was announced.
Effectively, for a year in his mid-20s, the two-time Olympian was, in the eyes of the swimming community, an Orwellian unperson. Not only was he absent from meets like that summer’s World Championships, but his absence was officially unremarked upon. Once the face of Canadian men’s swimming, his name has appeared on Swimming Canada’s website twice in two-plus years since his positive doping test, once for a national record of his that was broken.
It seems unlikely that a significant name in a significant global program should have a doping positive that escapes public scrutiny. It seems ever more earth-shattering that an entire program’s doping positives should be ignored – with the apparent blessing of administrative bodies – for much longer.
But that is the predicament that the world of swimming finds itself in this week. A bombshell investigation by the New York Times, German broadcaster ARD and the Daily Telegraph in Australia independently found 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for the drug trimetazidine in early 2021 but were allowed to compete and win medals at that summer’s Olympics in Paris.
The litigation as to whether the Chinese tests constitutes intentional doping will go on for years. It is unlikely to produce a satisfying answer. But a more pressing and immediate question should come from Saturday’s news: What responsibility do governing bodies, the World Anti-Doping Agency and World Aquatics, have to the rest of the athletes they oversee when such findings arise?
Athletes that test positive are entitled to a presumption of innocence. They are not entitled to, however, privacy in perpetuity, which is what WADA appeared ready to grant Chinese swimmers before journalistic entities intervened.
WADA, as far as its official numbers are to be trusted, indicates that doping in international sport is extremely rare. In its 2022 report, the last year for which complete data is available, 0.70 percent of some 218,000 tests of athletes in Olympic sports came back as either “atypical findings” or “adverse analytical findings,” to use WADA’s nomenclature. The 1,538 findings is not a direct match for the number of, “adjudicated or sanctioned Anti-Doping Rule Violations.” Some include therapeutic use exemptions or other reasons why a finding is not automatically a punishable offense.
Still, that means that 99.3 percent or more of athletes are competing cleanly. And it would appear that WADA’s responsibility to that population ends when the letter informing an athlete of his or her positive doping test is sent out.
Athletes that test positive are entitled to a presumption of innocence. They are not entitled to, however, privacy in perpetuity, which is what WADA appeared ready to grant Chinese swimmers before journalistic entities intervened.
This is not a critique of WADA’s adjudication process. The agency found in 2021 that, “there was no concrete basis to challenge the asserted contamination” as an explanation, WADA’s senior director of science and medicine, Olivier Rabin, said. Proving contamination is a high standard to bear. Evidence in the Chinese case – low level of chemical, breadth of positive tests, evidence of kitchen contamination – certainly points it, though there are circumstances (after a training camp? In an Olympic year?) that poke holes in that. Don’t expect a satisfying answer will ever emerge.
Instead, this is a question for the sporting bodies that have positioned themselves to defend the integrity of sport: Do the other 99 percent of athletes deserve to know that a process is underway? Do fans deserve to know? Should they assume, as in an individual case like Thormeyer’s where official silence creates a vacuum, the worst conclusion? Must media now begin every press availability by asking athletes if they’ve tested positive for any banned substances, since the official response is at best lacking and at worst intentionally obfuscatory?
You know who understands that? Travis Tygart, head head of USADA and one of America’s biggest proponents for clean sports through his years of action. And his statements drew him a threat of litigation from WADA.
“[I]n all contamination cases that we have proven, we provisionally suspended the athlete, disqualified the results, found a violation, and issued an announcement as required by the rules,” Tygart said. “Transparency is the key to shining the light in the darkness, and here, by not following the rules, WADA and CHINADA have left clean athletes in the dark.”
There are good reasons not to prosecute offenses in the court of public opinion. Anyone who’s witnessed the mob mentality that bursts forth from the fearsome void of the Internet understands this. Replacing China as the setting for this story would alter preconceived notions about innocence or guilt that many harbor. It would be fanciful to suggest otherwise. And not all atypical or adverse findings are evidence of violation, much less of intent.
“Transparency is the key to shining the light in the darkness, and here, by not following the rules, WADA and CHINADA have left clean athletes in the dark.”
– Travis Tygart
But at some point in the process, when doping agencies have a case to present and when athletes have been given a chance to defend themselves, doesn’t the public get to know? The anti-doping standard, that nobody but the athlete gets to know the details until everything has been resolved, elevates the athlete’s privacy above the integrity of the sport.
WADA’s treatment of the Chinese case undercuts the presumption of innocence. It would be lovely to believe that there’s no doping unless we hear otherwise. But the China case seems to suggest that if the doping is severe and widespread enough, it will be given official, face-saving cover. The secrecy validates some of the worst conspiratorial leanings, ones that are based on prejudice. Into the vacuum spill the worst assumptions, and when organizational mishandling happens to verify just one of them, the torrent grows stronger.
A doping finding is about molecules and bodies, about drug concentrations and metabolism. But it’s also about trust. It’s about a shared covenant about the values to sport – ones that surely have never permeated marketing materials or profit motives of the governing bodies purporting to uphold them.
Breaking that must have consequences in the present tense, not after the medals have been won, the checks have been cashed and the celebrations have been finished.
The 2021 Olympics were in Tokyo, not Paris as it says in the article.