American regulator Travis Tygart accuses the World Anti-Doping Agency of “allowing” Chinese authority to cover up illegal drug-taking by top swimmers.
Chinese drug cheats and officials willing to turn a blind eye threaten to make the Paris 2024 Olympics a “train wreck,” the top U.S. anti-doping regulator said.
Travis Tygart’s trenchant remarks cast another shadow over Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ongoing visit to France where he is meeting President Emmanuel Macron, less than three months before the Olympics begin.
Last month, The New York Times and German broadcaster ARD published a bombshell investigation revealing 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for prohibited drugs before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, but were still permitted to take part in the Games, with several winning medals.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Chinese drug cheats and officials willing to turn a blind eye threaten to make the Paris 2024 Olympics a “train wreck,” the top U.S. anti-doping regulator said.
Travis Tygart’s trenchant remarks cast another shadow over Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ongoing visit to France where he is meeting President Emmanuel Macron, less than three months before the Olympics begin.Last month, The New York Times and German broadcaster ARD published a bombshell investigation revealing 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for prohibited drugs before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, but were still permitted to take part in the Games, with several winning medals.The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the global drugs regulator for sport, accepted an explanation from Beijing’s domestic watchdog, CHINADA, pinning the swimmers’ failed tests on a contaminated hotel kitchen where the banned drug trimetazidine, known as TMZ, was present.
Russian state-sponsored cheating has marred previous Olympics, notably at Sochi in 2014 where Moscow orchestrated a brazen — and initially successful — doping plot, but Tygart said the Chinese scandal could be worse as it spotlights a failure of sports governance.“So on the heels of Russia — and look, I don’t know that the evidence of the systemic state-sponsored doping is at the level as it has been shown in the Russia case — but here I think it’s more troubling to clean athletes, because the system that’s supposed to hold every country accountable collapsed,” Tygart said.
Beijing has hosted two Olympic Games this century, at a time when the enthusiasm of cities to stage the sporting extravaganza has started to wane amid exorbitant costs.
The WADA spokesperson said, “This is utter nonsense” adding that it has previously shown via past doping cases that it’s not “reluctant to go after swimmers from China.”
American athletes have asked the U.S. government to investigate the cases and Tygart himself was in Washington last week to meet officials in Congress to discuss a response to the swimming scandal.
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