The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has insisted it would "not do anything different" in its handling of doping allegations against 23 Chinese swimmers, after it pushed back against criticism of a possible coverup from across the world of sport.
Reports last week said Chinese athletes had been able to compete at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 despite only months previously being found to have traces of the banned substance Trimetazidine (TMZ) in their system.
The athletes, whose test results were never made public, were adjudged by Chinese authorities to have been the victims of contamination, a verdict Wada chose not to appeal against.
Yesterday, in response to the reports and ensuing public criticism from bodies such as the United States Anti-Doping Agency (Usada), a series of senior Wada officials sought to lay out their side of the story. There was, they said, no evidence to contradict Chinese findings, while the levels of TMZ found in the swimmers' urine samples were too low to afford a performance-enhancing benefit.
Meanwhile the decision to keep the results secret was within the scope of China's anti-doping agency (Chinada), according to Wada, and could only be overturned by appeal to the court of arbitration for sport.
This story is from the April 23, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the April 23, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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