Chinese doping scandal has muddied the waters for clean athletes in Paris

On the day after the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the International Olympic Committee will reallocate 10 medals wrongly “won” years ago by athletes now adjudged to have fallen foul of sport’s anti-doping rules.

Those medals will be awarded instead to athletes who, as matters have transpired, should have had them hanging around their necks at Sydney 2000, Beijing 2008 and London 2012.

Jamaica’s Beverley McDonald will be awarded the bronze medal for the women’s 200m that was run in Sydney’s Olympic Stadium on 28 September 2000. Australians Melinda Gainsford-Taylor finished fifth and Cathy Freeman sixth in that race, and McDonald, now 54, finished fourth. Her elevation to a podium position is a consequence of Marion Jones’ disqualification on account of her admitted and proven doping.

The IOC disqualified Jones’ Sydney 2000 results in 2007 and she was jailed the following year, not for doping but for lying about her doping to US federal prosecutors. Seventeen years later, McDonald will finally get her day in the sun.

One wonders how McDonald will feel at that ceremony on the banks of the Seine. Exhilarated to have finally been awarded an Olympic medal? Or as an athlete caught up in someone else’s doping masterplan, will she feel cheated, deflated and defrauded? She will probably feel all of that at once, which is hardly satisfactory but that’s the system.

Nowadays, there’s a 10-year statute of limitations in the WADA code governing anti-doping rules, which means that if an athlete wins a gold medal in Paris they will be required to give bodily samples that will be kept for a decade.

Simon Letch

What that means is that if for whatever reason, such as testing advances or fresh suspicions, those samples are reanalysed and traces of something forbidden is detected, anti-doping charges could in 2033 be laid against an athlete who wins gold in 2024.

The IOC’s “medal reallocation process” demands that all legal appeal proceedings and remedies involving the sanctioned athlete must be exhausted in entirety. Realistically, that could take another three years.

After that, the process is that the IOC executive board asks the relevant international federation (World Athletics in Beverley McDonald’s case) for advice about the reallocation process before making any reallocation decision. There’s another year or more.

Then, even once the IOC makes any decision to reallocate a medal, that still leaves the practical and logistical requirements of involving the affected athlete and asking them what it is that they want in terms of a ceremony or not. There’s another year or two at least, and perhaps four, that will flash right by before a reallocation ceremony might be organised at a subsequent Games.

Marion Jones was stripped of her 200m gold medal from the Sydney Olympics for doping.

The IOC will say, and assert, that this whole rigmarole exemplifies the “big strides being taken to restore trust across the Olympic Movement”.

On that, something is surely better than nothing. Undoubtedly. Just ask the likes of Great Britain’s Sharron Davies, or Australia’s Michelle Ford, whether they’d agree to a reallocation of an Olympic medal removed from an East German swimmer who defeated them in Moscow in 1980. It’s not a complicated discussion, at least in that sense.

And yet, it’s agonising for any athlete to qualify for the Games while harbouring almost no faith in the system. For the 41 Australian swimmers now bound for Paris, how can they know that the Olympic competition will be fair?

Just wait a decade, I’d suggest. Olympic dreams do, as they say, die in June. For those whose dreams remain in rude health, is it really that simple?

Australia’s Michelle Ford won gold and bronze as well as a fourth-placed finish at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

How many of the 23 Chinese athletes, who in January 2021 dined at the national swim team’s canteen and subsequently tested positive for the heart medication trimetazidine, so staggeringly omnipresent in China, will stand behind the blocks in Paris next month?

Who could know. The Chinese anti-doping authorities never named the athletes, nor did WADA or World Aquatics or any other organisation with any jurisdiction to provisionally suspend them, as a protective measure.

Nor were the athletes sanctioned in any way. A two-months-late “investigation”, so helpfully completed by the Chinese secret police and no doubt involving an incalculable number of industrial-sized cans of Mr Sheen, quelled all concern as to any possibility of nefarious conduct on the athletes’ or their entourage’s part.

But now, as reported last week in The New York Times and confirmed by WADA, for three of those Chinese athletes it actually wasn’t their first rodeo. In 2016 and 2017, that subset of swimmers tested positive for a different prohibited substance, clenbuterol. That’s seriously unlucky.

It helps to think of clenbuterol as having the propensity to mimic the physiological effects of an anabolic agent, without being pharmacologically classified as a steroid. It’s most definitely banned in sport for athletes and has been forever, such is its efficacy in building lean muscle and stripping fat.

Those three athletes were never identified by the Chinese authorities or any other organisation. They weren’t charged, provisionally suspended, sanctioned or otherwise roadblocked. Just like they would be in the aftermath of eating the food of the poisoned kitchen in January 2021, they were cleared and cleansed in relation to their clenbuterol positives.

“Trace amounts” of clenbuterol, according to WADA. “Meat contamination” is the cause, apparently. Believable? Maybe: a 2012 study conducted by Cologne’s German Sport University found that four-fifths of subjects tested had clenbuterol in their system following culinary tours of China. A decade ago, the Australian cyclist Michael Rogers tested positive for clenbuterol, but was cleared by WADA upon Rogers making representations as to the consumption of Chinese meat.

It’s possible the decision to clear the three Chinese swimmers in 2016 and 2017 is underpinned by common sense, but it’s difficult to square up against the central, strict liability premise of applicable anti-doping systems; where guilt can exist in a vacuum that excludes blameworthiness.

German table tennis player Dimitrij Ovtcharov succeeded on a clenbuterol-laced steak defence in 2010; Michael Rogers’ former teammate Alberto Contador was stripped of the 2010 Tour de France title for a clenbuterol positive test, and a failed petition that it was all due to his being forced to consume substandard South American beef.

All of which might mean that when in China, it’s safer eating the cardboard packaging your meal comes in than the meal itself.

The bigger issue here is with respect to the absence of transparency. The three Chinese athletes cleared of wrongdoing went on to big things. Two won Olympic gold in Tokyo three years ago; the third is apparently a current world record holder.

All three may be innocent of any relevant wrongdoing in relation to the clenbuterol matter and also the trimetazidine positives. But because all has been smothered and would’ve remained so but for the determination of investigative journalists shining a light into dark corners, trust can’t thrive.

Which means that athletes lining up in Paris, with no known skeletons in the closet, face a harsh reality of the unknown unknowns.