Anti-drug protests hang on a decision
MACK Horton has called a halt to his protest against Sun Yang and the wider doping problem. The question now is whether he will need to carry forward his powerful antidrug message through to the Tokyo Olympics next year.
On the form he has shown at the world championships in South Korea, Horton almost certainly will be at the Olympics as an Australian team member, though perhaps not as an 800m swimmer, if his expected but still disappointing swim yesterday leads him to quit the event.
Whether Sun will also be there, swimming for China, will now hinge on a Court of Arbitration for Sport tribunal hearing in September.
The tribunal holds the fate of Sun’s career in its hands. On paper, he is the greatest male distance swimmer the world has ever seen, capable of achieving what Kieren Perkins, Grant Hackett and Ian Thorpe could not — by winning the 200m, 400m and 1500m freestyle at world and Olympic level, with three world championship 800m freestyle titles also thrown into the mix.
It is a record without peer but it all will be trashed if the tribunal finds he completely overstepped the mark by having blood samples taken by a legitimate drug-testing agency smashed with a hammer during a testing raid gone feral last year.
There are, of course, complexities to the case that Hackett’s ex-coach Denis Cotterell, now the coach of Sun, believes deserve to be aired before the Chinese champion can be tossed on to the scrapheap.
It was for presumably that reason that FINA permitted him to swim here, but that decision was a proverbial Chinese red rag to a bull to the vast majority of swimmers who are entirely clean.
Only Horton took a stand — or rather didn’t take the podium — but the standing ovation he received on Sunday night as he returned to the athletes’ village would have told him that the swimming world is behind him.
If Horton feels the need to continue his campaign in Tokyo, he will need to find some other way of making his statement, with the International Olympic Committee taking a dim view of podium protests.
The support keeps building. Yesterday the Australian Swimming Coaches and Teachers Association, a body that has been a long-time opponent of doping in the sport, issued a statement of support for Horton and called on FINA to take “meaningful and immediate action” against drug cheats, demanding life bans be imposed.
To date, FINA’s only response has been to send Horton and Swimming Australia a perfunctory warning letter, one which contained no actual warning. As with so many other FINA actions on the drugs issue, it was too little, too late, too insipid.