The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Amid uproar over doping, China maintains silence
Rival Olympians angry over response to 23 swimmers testing positive in Tokyo.
HONG KONG — In past years, when athletes from China have been accused of doping, the government has mobilized its propaganda apparatus of state-owned newspapers, television commentators and social media accounts to defend the athletes and deflect criticism of China’s sports system.
This time, faced with anger from rival Olympians and charges of a coverup over the revelation that 23 elite Chinese swimmers had tested positive for a banned substance before competing in the 2021 Olympic Games, China is taking a different approach: virtual silence.
Even as the issue is being debated widely abroad, including in Congress last week, Chinese domestic media coverage has been limited to a handful of terse official statements. Censors have meticulously scrubbed and limited online discussions of the dispute — a level of censorship experts say is rare outside the most politically sensitive topics.
The change of tactic, experts say, reflects what is at stake for China weeks before the Olympic Games start in Paris. Eleven of the 23 swimmers who tested positive in 2021 have been named to the squad heading to Paris. Swimming is one of China’s most high-profile sports, which Beijing invested heavily in over the decades to turn the country into an Olympic powerhouse.
China has denied the accusations of wrongdoing. It has long sought to clean up its sports sector, stepping up testing after doping scandals in the 1990s and early 2000s. That makes suggestions of a cover-up highly embarrassing for China, where athletic competition has an outsize role in burnishing the image of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
“There is basically zero media coverage of this in China, which is very different from before when other Chinese athletes have been accused of doping,” said Haozhou Pu, an associate professor at the University of Dayton who studies sports in China.
Pu said officials are most likely hoping the story, which was reported by The New York Times in April, dies down before the start of the Olympics so that it does not distract the Chinese public or China’s swim team. That may explain China’s restrained response, Pu said.
“No news could be good news,” Pu said.
When China’s most famous swimmer, Sun Yang, was accused of doping in 2018, state media scrutinized the fairness of the investigation with extensive coverage, and social media users were allowed to leave hundreds of thousands of comments voicing support for Sun.
By comparison, state media coverage of the 23 swimmers has been largely limited to official remarks. Chinese authorities have said the swimmers’ positive tests in 2021 were based on tiny amounts of the banned substance that came from contaminated food, an explanation that some experts have questioned. The swimmers themselves have made no public comments.
Chinese news reports have carried statements by the Chinese Foreign Ministry saying the country had a zero-tolerance policy on doping, and by China’s anti-doping agency, Chinada, disputing the reporting by the Times and accusing the newspaper of violating “media ethics and morals.” One exception was an editorial in the Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper, that accused rival nations of intentionally “manipulating the issue of doping” and “smearing China’s swimming program.”
Discussion of the story also appears to be heavily censored on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform similar to X. Searches for terms such as “doping,” “drug test,” “banned drugs,” “doping swimming” and “Chinese swimming team” mostly turn up posts of Chinese news articles uniformly carrying official statements from the foreign ministry and China’s anti-doping agency.
As recently as 2022, internet censors allowed Weibo users to rally around Lyu Xiaojun, an Olympic gold medal-winning weightlifter who was suspended for doping. Scores of Chinese social media users accused “Westerners” of framing Lyu.
More notably in 2012, Chinese state media came to the defense of teenage sensation Ye Shiwen, a swimmer whose record-shattering victory in the 400-meter individual medley at the London Games was met with suggestions that she might have used performance-enhancing drugs.
Ye, who was 16 at the time, never tested positive, and many in China saw the allegations as outrageous. China’s state broadcaster lauded her for enduring “humiliation” at the hands of the “psychologically unbalanced Western media.” (Ye, who is not among the 23 swimmers, is competing in Paris next month.)
Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese censorship at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the level of censorship around the current dispute over the 23 swimmers is similar to what would be applied to discussions around far more sensitive subjects. Such topics include the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters, and elections in Taiwan, the de facto independent island democracy claimed by Beijing, Xiao said.
He noted that this also appeared to be the first time censors have imposed a blanket ban on online comments criticizing athletes accused of doping. Before, comments expressing disapproval of athletes sometimes slipped through the cracks, such as with Sun, a polarizing figure whom some Chinese internet users considered arrogant and deserving of his subsequent ban for doping.
The scandal comes at a bad time for China’s top sports authority, the General Administration of Sport, which oversees the Chinese Olympic Committee. In May, China announced that the former head of the authority, Gou Zhongwen, was being investigated for corruption.
China’s official explanation for the positive tests could raise questions from the Chinese public about how competently swimming officials are managing their athletes.
Chinada asserts that the 23 swimmers were unwittingly contaminated with trace amounts of a banned substance called trimetazidine, or TMZ, a drug used to treat patients with heart disease that can also help athletes increase stamina and hasten recovery times. Chinada said the swimmers ingested TMZ through tainted food from a hotel kitchen. It did not explain how the substance ended up on athletes’ plates.
American officials and other experts, citing protocol, said the swimmers should have been suspended or publicly identified pending further investigation. They said the failure to do so rested on Chinese sports officials; swimming’s international governing body, World Aquatics; and the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, the Montreal-based global authority that oversees national drug-testing programs.
Last month, the Times revealed that three of the 23 swimmers had tested positive several years earlier for another performance-enhancing drug. They also had avoided being publicly identified or suspended.
WADA confirmed the positive tests for “trace amounts” of the banned substance, known as clenbuterol, a drug commonly found in meat in some countries like China that also can help athletes increase muscle growth and burn fat. WADA said the three swimmers were contaminated by tainted food, but it did not explain why China did not abide by rules that compel them to publicly disclose the positive tests.
One of the best indications that golf was starting to catch on as an Olympic sport came from a player who never even made it to the podium. Rory McIlroy was part of a seven-man playoff for the bronze medal at the Tokyo Games, eliminated on the third of four extra holes. He said when it was over, “I never tried so hard to finish third.” McIlroy was among those who skipped the Olympics when golf returned to the program in 2016 at Rio de Janeiro. He said then he wouldn’t be watching golf, only “the stuff that matters.” The next time around, he was all in.
And he’s not alone. Only two eligible players are sitting out the men’s competition when it begins Aug. 1 at Le Golf National outside Paris.
One is Bernd Wiesberger of Austria, who withdrew from the Tokyo Games right after he moved into position to make it. The other is Cristobal del Solar of Chile, who plays on the Korn Ferry Tour and doesn’t want to miss a week if it jeopardizes his chance to get a PGA Tour card.
In most cases, the competition was fierce just to get to the Paris Games.
“Qualifying was my first goal this year,” defending gold medalist Xander Schauffele said. “It’s a very hard team to qualify for on the U.S. side.”
The Americans have two players in the top 10 who won’t be going, including U.S. Open champion Bryson DeChambeau.
Of course, there are no excuses for skipping this year. Rio de Janeiro carried the threat of the Zika virus. The Tokyo Games were postponed one year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning no spectators, no opportunity for athletes to attend other events and daily coronavirus testing.
Still to be determined is the value of gold, silver and bronze.
Given the endless golf schedule, the silver claret jug from the British Open will be awarded just 11 days before the pursuit of a gold medal.
“For track and field, gymnastics, winning a gold medal from when you were a kid was the top of the top,” said Schauffele, who won his first major this year at the PGA Championship. “People ask me now about a major and a gold medal. Growing up, it was about watching the majors. Maybe in 50 years it will be different.
“But there’s added emphasis on trying to win one,” he said of an Olympic gold. “It’s starting to pull some of its own weight. And I imagine it will be pulling more and more.”
The gold medalists from Rio de Janeiro ( Justin Rose and Inbee Park) and Tokyo (Schauffele and Nelly Korda) all have major championship hardware at home.
Schauffele and Korda will be among the contenders to give golf back-to-back gold medalists, a difficult task in golf regardless of the brand of trophy.
Scottie Scheffler remains the clear favorite everywhere he goes, already a six-time winner against the best fields in golf, including the Masters and The Players Championship. The gap between Scheffler and the rest of golf in the world ranking is a size not seen since the peak years of Tiger Woods.
“Playing for your country is always extremely exciting . ... I think it will be extra special doing it on the Olympic stage,” Scheffler said. “It’s also good bragging rights for people when they tell me golf’s not a sport. I can say it’s an Olympic sport.” Korda is more of a mystery. The American, who will be 26 when the women’s competition begins, was unbeatable in March and April as she tied an LPGA record with five consecutive victories, including her second major at the Chevron Championship.
But then she took a 10 on one hole in the U.S. Women’s Open and shot 80, missing the cut. She missed another cut in Michigan, and then shot 81 in the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship and missed another cut in a major.
Typical of golf these days, there is a LIV Golf effect. Seven players from the Saudi-funded league will be in the Olympics. The list starts with Jon Rahm, the twotime major winner who defected to LIV at the end of last year. His world ranking was high enough that it didn’t affect his Olympic standing.
The same can’t be said of DeChambeau, who this year tied for sixth in the Masters, was the runner-up to Schauffele at the PGA Championship and beat McIlroy at the U.S. Open. Because majors are the only events where he can accrue world ranking points, it left him out of the top four Americans who get to play.
The Olympic ranking is based on the world ranking, and countries get a maximum of four players provided they are among the top 15 in the world.
Joaquin Niemann of Chile and Abraham Ancer of Mexico were among those who played where they could — mainly the Asian Tour — to get whatever ranking points they could. Ancer narrowly made it back for his second Olympics.
The venue will be familiar to a handful of players and a television audience. Le Golf National has hosted the French Open 29 times — three past champions, including Tommy Fleetwood, will be in the Olympics — and more famously it hosted the Ryder Cup in 2018.
Five players from that Ryder Cup will be at the Olympics, all of them European, including Rahm and McIlroy.
They are playing for the flag, yes, but they are playing for themselves and a medal. In that respect, it’s just like any another tournament except it comes around only once every four years. That makes it special, whether a player has won a major or not.
“You’re playing for a medal, for bragging rights. It’s the rawest form of competition and it has an old-school feeling to it when you play the game because you love it,” Schauffele said.