Miracles from Ma’s No 1 herb tonic, with a touch of TMZ

In 1993, a team of young female Chinese runners came, saw and conquered the World Athletics Championships in Stuttgart. Wang Junxia led the charge, taking the 10,000m title, Qu Yunxi the 3,000m and Liu Dong the 1,500m. In total, they won six medals over these distances in the German summer.

For many, the distance between their achievement and credibility was impossibly and suspiciously wide. The women had come out of nowhere, coached by a short-tempered chain smoker called Ma Junren. They were “Ma’s Army” and as all armies march on their stomachs, some had cause to suspect they were marching on drugs.

“I have never seen any drugs. I don’t even know what drugs are,” said Ma, who was not shy of talking himself up. He said his mother was a “‘deer deity’ ,a mythical beast which helped athletes run faster… he had a secret elixir which helped athletes recover quickly from exhaustion, made from the blood of freshly decapitated turtles and a fungus which grew on a caterpillar found only in the Tibetan highlands”, the Irish Times reported in 2000.

HARMLESS

“The potion, according to Zhao (Zhao Yu, author of the book An Inquiry Into Ma’s Army in 1997), contained traditional Chinese health remedies, including red ginseng, deer tail, rhizoma gastrodiae, the root of membranous milk vetch, Chinese wolfberries, donkeyhide gelatin, jujube and Chinese angelica: all harmless and certainly not illegal.

“Along with donkey-hide soup, the brew was drunk regularly by the mainly uneducated peasant girls whom Ma took under his wing and subjected to military-type training. He got them to run 65km a day, six days a week. Cosmetics, long hair and boyfriends were forbidden. Some were required to run behind a motorcycle to which they were attached by a rope.”

He sold the elixir by the bottle in department stores across Asia as “Ma’s Family Army Number One Tonic”. In 1994, the then president of the IAAF, Primo Nebiolo, told the New York Times the “stories about turtle blood are just for show” and that Ma was just showing off to be a “celebrity”.

Nebiolo, who died in 1999, was said by Ollan Cassell, a former IAAF vice-president, to have helped “capped” the number of positive doping tests at the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics at 12, despite more athletes having failed them.

“The decision formed part of a pact between then IAAF head Primo Nebiolo and former International Olympic Committee (IOC) President, Juan Antonio Samaranch,” reported Inside The Games. “This decision was reportedly taken in order to give the impression they were taking a strong anti-doping stance while avoiding too big of a scandal ‘to protect the Olympics and the US’.”

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has been alleged to have buried another scandal after 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for Trimetazidine (TMZ) seven months before the Tokyo Olympics. WADA “accepted an explanation from the Chinese authorities that the kitchen at their hotel was contaminated”, it was reported. The test results were kept secret.

“[German broadcaster] ARD and the New York Times said they had seen a 61-page investigative report from the Chinese anti-doping agency, Chinada, to WADA in 2021, which said that it had found trace elements of TMZ in the extractor fan, on spice containers and in the drain of a hotel kitchen in Shijiazhuang, where the swimmers had been staying.

“Chinada also pointed to low concentrations of TMZ, a heart drug that improves performance, in the urine samples of the swimmers as grounds to conclude intentional doping was ‘impossible’. According to the New York Times, it did not explain how a prescription drug available only in pill form had contaminated the kitchen.”

EXTENSIVE USE

China sent 30 swimmers to Tokyo, where they won six medals, three of them gold. Regan Smith, Katie Ledecky and Torri Huske, who finished behind Chinese swimmers in 2021, can be forgiven if they wonder what might have been. So, too, can Duncan Scott of Britain, who took silver just 0.28sec behind Wang Shun in the 200m individual medley.

What if those test results had not been kept secret? What if they indicate a resurgence of the doping that was rampant in Chinese sport, according to Xue Yinxian, a former Olympic doctor, who lives in political asylum in Germany.

“She told German broadcaster ARD that more than 10,000 athletes across sports including ‘football, volleyball, basketball, table tennis, badminton, athletics, swimming, diving, gymnastics and weightlifting’ were all involved. ‘In the 1980s and 90s, Chinese athletes on the national teams made extensive use of doping substances,’ Xue said.”

In February 2017, according to Inside the Games, “a letter reportedly signed in 1995 was published in which Wang Junxia, the 3,000m and former 10,000m women’s world record holder, seemingly admitted to doping. ‘We are humans, not animals,’ read the letter. ‘For many years, [we were] forced to take a large dose of illegal drugs — it was true.’”

It seems it takes a lot more than turtle blood and herbs to produce miraculous performances.