China’s generosity in lead-up to cleared doping tests reflects its ‘growing’ influence on WADA
Rajasthan stays on top in IPL
JAIPUR, India, April 23, (AP): Yashasvi Jaiswal ended a string of poor scores by posting his second century in the Indian Premier League as Rajasthan Royals thrashed Mumbai Indians by nine wickets .
Jaiswal scored an unbeaten 104 off 60 balls, including nine fours and seven sixes, to lead Rajasthan to 183-1 after Mumbai struggled to 179-9.
Medium-pacer Sandeep Sharma collected 5-18 in four overs for Rajasthan while leg-spinner Yuzvendra Chahal took one but became the first bowler to reach 200 IPL wickets.
Jaiswal’s previous highest score this season was 39.
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He and opening partner Jos Buttler combined for 61 in the power play when rain interrupted the chase for 45 minutes without losing any overs. Jaiswal didn’t lose focus but Buttler was bowled in the eighth over for 50 off 31 balls.
Jaiswal accelerated, scoring the next 54 runs off 29 balls, which included five more sixes. In doing so, Jaiswal added 109 runs off 65 balls for the second wicket with skipper Sanju Samson, who finished 38 not out.
Jaiswal became the youngest batter at 22 to score multiple hundreds in IPL history. His first was also against Mumbai last year.
Earlier, put into bat, Mumbai suffered another top-order collapse against the Rajasthan pacers.
Trent Boult got rid of Rohit Sharma for 6, and Sandeep Sharma had Ishan Kishan caught behind for a three-ball duck. Sandeep Sharma then sent back Suryakumar Yadav for 10 and Mumbai was 20-3 after 19 balls.
Chahal’s milestone wicket was Mohammad Nabi. Chahal claimed 200 wickets in his 153rd IPL game.
Tilak Varma countered with a half-century off 38 balls, and finished with a team-high 65. Nehal Wadhera added 49 off 24, including four sixes, and their partnership made the five-time champions competitive.
But Rajasthan won with eight balls to spare and stayed atop the table after its seventh win in eight games. Mumbai was second to last.
WASHINGTON, April 23, (AP): In the two years before the World AntiDoping Agency signed off on clearing 23 Chinese swimmers of intentionally taking performance enhancers, that country’s government contributed nearly $2 million above its yearly requirements to WADA programs, including one designed to strengthen the agency’s investigations and intelligence unit.
The Associated Press obtained confidential minutes from meetings of the WADA executive committee that lists China as having given $993,000 in 2018 and $992,000 in 2019, two years that led to one of its Olympians being elected as one of the agency’s vice presidents.
The Chinese contributions were part of a pattern that illustrates the country’s growing influence on the drugfighting agency at about the same time WADA’s relationship with its biggest contributor, the United States, was fraying.
There is no indication from the documents AP reviewed that China donated the money in expectation of a quid pro quo to gloss over positive drug tests. In fact, WADA didn’t hide the extra funding; it put out a little-noticed news release in December 2020 announcing China’s $992,000 donation.
The main part of WADA’s budget each year comes from a 50-50 split between governments of the world and the Olympic movement. China’s additional contributions came on top of $430,000 its government supplied WADA as part of the routine payments in 2019.
The U.S. gave the largest regular contribution that year - $2.51 million, but that came as its relationship with
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WADA was growing tense.
By 2021, the U.S. was sparring with WADA over passage of a new law written to combat doping in response to the long-running drug scandal in Russia. It also was withholding part of its payment, with the country’s top government representative in the world anti-doping structure referencing “sorry state of affairs” that existed in WADA’s governance.
While the U.S. tangled with WADA, China was chipping in on what was essentially a fundraising effort by WADA to ramp up its fledgling intelligence and investigations (I&I) program, which played a role in the current case. One of the documents obtained by the AP references committee member Ugur Erdener briefing the panel in September 2020 about the program and telling members that “only China, as far as he knew, had made a donation of 500,000 US dollars.”
That amount would grow to $992,000 by the end of 2020 - nearly three-quarters of the money received for the program to that point, and an amount surpassed only by India when it contributed $1 million a year later, according to WADA’s 2021 annual report.
That China was about to host the 2022 Winter Olympics and India was on board to host a key IOC meeting could have played into the donations.
The giving also came in the leadup to the November 2019 election of IOC member Yang Yang of China to WADA vice president. Yang was elected to her second three-year term in 2022.
Last year, according to another WADA document seen by the AP, the Chinese sports products company
ANTA Sports signed a three-year deal to provide WADA-branded sports apparel. Among the other groups ANTA sponsors are China’s national swimming federation and the Chinese Olympic committee.
Last week, reporting by The New York Times and German broadcaster ARD revealed that WADA had cleared the Chinese swimmers of doping violations by accepting the Chinese anti-doping agency’s reasoning that the athletes had been exposed to a banned heart medication through contamination.
There was no public notice of the case, nor any provisional suspension, both of which are called for in the world anti-doping code. The quiet handling of the cases occurred about seven months before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Even a provisional suspension at that time could have put those swimmers’ eligibility for the games in jeopardy.
WADA used its news conference to defend and explain its process, saying in essence there was no effective way to win a case based on countering China’s claims that the swimmers had been subject to contamination.
“In the absence of any evidence of any sort of misconduct ... I’m very confident we would have had close to a 0% chance in establishing” a case that the swimmers intentionally cheated, WADA general counsel Ross Wenzel explained.
Of the 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive, 13 competed in Tokyo and four of those 13 won medals. Many of the athletes still compete for China and are expected to swim at this year’s Paris Olympics.