‘Russia didn’t change anything’
Chinese doping scandal feels familiar, with WADA taking offender’s word
Beckie Scott once told me “Russia changed everything,” and today you can feel that. Scott, the decorated Canadian cross-country skier, was also a key figure in anti-doping, and the exposure of Russia’s extensive state-sponsored doping system over the past decade was a relative high point in the fight for clean sport, despite its rolling aftermath. At least we knew the truth, or near enough.
Well, now China has finally been dragged into the doping spotlight, and the World Anti-Doping Agency has been dragged along as well. It’s a potentially seismic moment in sport. And it is exposing fault lines — and questions — that weren’t buried long.
The story seems simple enough. In 2021, eight months before the Tokyo Olympics, 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for a performance enhancer at a meet in China: trimetazidine, or TMZ. It’s a banned heart medication that can enhance endurance and shorten recovery times.
WADA was informed two months later, though it had already received whistleblower tips in 2020. With COVID limiting travel, and therefore an investigation, WADA worked from home and eventually accepted the Chinese explanation of a mass contamination via food, and never made the case public. The Chinese investigation was carried out by the Ministry of Public Security, which a documentary by the German TV network ARD described as “an arm of state surveillance, with secret service powers.” The ministry did not offer a source for how a banned heart medication got into a hotel kitchen and affected 23 of over 200 athletes.
Many of those swimmers competed in Tokyo with no public sanction. They won at least five medals, including three golds. And had a whistleblower not been persistent — the same story as Russia, that — the positive tests would have remained buried to this day. WADA received tips on Chinese doping in July 2021, and again in April of 2023. Nothing went public until ARD and the New York Times started closing in.
It feels like a repeat of Russia, in post-Russia circumstances. You can accept WADA’s explanation of its inability to investigate on the ground in March 2021 with COVID, with China. But the result of its extensive explanation Monday was that WADA more or less deferred completely to CHINADA and its initial rulings. That was striking.
Essentially, the world’s anti-doping regulator outsourced strict liability — the idea that you are responsible for what is in your body. The secrecy, too, flows from WADA accepting CHINADA’s explanation of contamination from afar.
This could shake the pillars again. WADA exists in a very purposeful thicket of regulations and systems, but the context seems very simple. Chinese swimmer Sun Yang, one of the most accomplished swimmers in history, failed a doping test for TMZ in 2014. Russian doping architect Grigory Rodchenkov wrote that when Russia was doping its athletes en masses at the 2014 Sochi Games, one of the drugs they used was TMZ.
And if WADA agrees that an incomplete explanation for a mass positive test event from the security service of an authoritarian state is adequate, then you might wonder whether we should just turn out the lights.
“Obviously, Russia didn’t change anything, if we’re honest,” says Scott. “It’s astonishing, actually.”
In 2016, WADA had to be dragged into actually investigating Russia, but did — pulled by people like Scott, who headed WADA’s Athlete Committee, and by Canadian IOC titan Dick Pound and several others. Afterward, the IOC fought like hell to keep the Russians in the Games no matter what, and pushed out or muffled the most principled figures in their anti-doping orbit.
Now, WADA seems to be in a strange place indeed. On a conference call Monday, WADA president Witold Banka said that if he had to do it again, he would conduct this investigation the exact same way. He cited a lack of confirmatory evidence from any sources, and an inability to credibly challenge China’s theory. Various WADA figures walked reporters through their reasoning without ever answering the question of where the contamination came from, and with an implicit trust in the information that came from CHINADA. At times, they mentioned that the amounts weren’t performance enhancing, as if that mattered under WADA’s code. As the advocacy group Global Athlete pointed out, even if an athlete proves the unintentional ingestion of TMZ, it can result in a two-year ban rather than four.
And WADA is now threatening to sue its critics, including the U.S. Anti-Doping Association, whose CEO Travis Tygart has been one of the more hardline figures in world antidoping; that has never happened before. CHINADA is threatening legal action, too. The U.S. and German governments are interested, and the Americans actually have laws that might be useful here. One is named after Rodchenkov.
This is a bubbling pot, overflowing in every direction. And more than anything, it looks like the world’s anti-doping agency deciding that this time, under these circumstances, they didn’t want to touch the stove.