WADA In Staunch Defence Of Decision Not To Challenge 28 Positives In 23 Chinese Swimmers
WADA held a online media conference yesterday to offer its fullest response to the storm of criticism over revelations that no action was taken in the cases of 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a powerful heart and energy system booster in a mass-contamination, in-competition, event ahead of the Tokyo Olympic Games.
Witold Banka, president of WADA, began the presentations with a staunch defence of the anti-doping agency’s actions and decisions. “If we had to do it all over again, we would not change a thing”. This was later explained as meaning that “in the same circumstances” of a Covid lockdown that meant WADA had no access to China and could not carry out any direct investigations of Hotel Contamination or interview any witnesses face-to-face on the ground in China.
Whatever the circumstances, waves of concern from sports organisations around the world continue to pour in. This morning, Aquatics GB, joined the chorus of criticism with this:
And USADA’s response to the WADA media conference:
USADA Calls For Independent Prosecutor & Overhaul of WADA Over New China Crisis
What Might Gatekeeper Have Done Differently?
When in the press conference Director of Intelligence and Investigations Günter Younger was later asked what WADA would have done had it had access to China and the hotel, the answer was, in my opinion, not nearly as robust as it might in terms of the investigative procedures that one might have in mind for such circumstances with access to China.
In the actual circumstances, of no access, Chinese security services are said by Chinada to have tested for the banned substance in the kitchen of the hotel where the contamination is said to have taken place two and a half months after the swimmers tested positive. Such timelines were among factors that ultimately did not influence the WADA jury but are certainly questionable.
Hajo Seppelt, head of the ARD China Files documentary team, suggested that was ludicrous and required us all to believe that no cleaning of the kitchen had taken place in that time, no other sports teams had been there, no other cooking and people had entered that place. There is no suggestion from Chinada that the hotel and its kitchen were sealed, crime-scene like, and so the possibility of evidence being tampered with, unintentionally or otherwise, is a clear possibility.
In general, I found the conference instructive, for a few good, some not-so-good reasons, some “really not good enough” and a few “just-no, completely the wrong message to rogues” moments in the mix , among them the surface answer of head of WADA Director General Olivier Niggli when it came to the question of protecting “innocent athletes”. Here is what he said: “We are here to protect innocent athletes and in this case we could not pursue these Chinese athletes when believing in them being innocent victims of contamination.”
Therein lies the problem. To believe is not to know. To know is where power lies – and power is often handed to rogues when they know and we believe because we were not in a position to seek the evidence needed to know.
The Chinese athletes may well be innocent victims of ‘contamination’ or deliberate spiking or working under coercive coaches, for example. We know that has most certainly happened in the past, including the recent past. And yet that has not led to “all clear too go” in a great many other cases when the “innocent” athlete is caught. The athlete takes the wrap, the record shows. Largely, the entourage, including rogues, do not.
How many doctors (including some in anti-doping positions), governance figures and other players in the entourages have been called to account down the decades? Answer: not nearly as many as ought to have been.
It’s true that the protection principle must apply to all athletes, from wherever they hail and in whatever circumstances they find themselves in but the truth is that Chinese swimmers have for a very long time working in a system where rogues have operated at the very highest levels of the sport, including coaching, medical services, governance and, indeed, anti-doping. In that context, much of what we are being told raises more questions than we have answers to as things stand.
WADA knows well, having pursued Sun Yang with a robust and smart challenge to what was clearly wrong, that in his entourage were those who admitted during one of the two CAS processes that led to the swimmer being banned for four years and three months, that they had threatened anti-doping test officials in their attempts to persuade Sun to remove a blood sample from the chain of custody in 2018.
He did and was gone. They remain.
Further analysis of all of that to follow in the days ahead.
For now, here is the question I got to put and the link to the video of the WADA presentation and the questions that followed from journalists around the world, with more analysis to come from SOS.
My question for The Times: It’s really a question of trust. Obviously, you have to treat your partners and all the countries in similar ways but do you have any concerns that taking the word of a Chinese state security service operation – effectively, those are the people who tested whether there was a presence of anything in the hotel; they are the people feeding you this information. It didn’t come directly from Chinada. It came from state security services. Do you not have any concerns that that doesn’t give you a good enough neutral view of what’s actually happened?
WADA Counsel Ross Wenzel:
As a lawyer, I can say that we didn’t have any evidence that there’d been anything untoward that had gone on. If what’s underlying the question is a thesis that this might have been planted in the kitchen and then that gave rise to the detection … we didn’t have any evidence of that. As I said before, I’m very confident that if we’d have gone to the CAS with all of the five or six elements that I’ve already mentioned, that already suggested contamination as opposed to deliberate ingestion, coupled with detection in the hotel kitchen, and in the absence of any evidence of any sort of any sort of misconduct of the kind you may be alluding to, I’m very confident that we would have had close to a zero per cent chance of succeeding in establishing that the athletes had not met their burden of to show the origin of the … substance on the balance of probabilities.
Ross Wenzel. Image courtesy of WADA
What WADA Believes
One key issue that was not satisfactorily answered, in my opinion (notwithstanding the conference was an hour and 42 minutes and even then there was no time to consider every nuance and depth to every question), was that of comparative cases. Swimming has had plenty of cases where it has been accepted at CAS that a substance made its way into a body inadvertently, through contamination or through mislabelling or … etc.
Wenzel noted that “each case turns on its merits”. Pursued and challenged by WADA, Shayna Jack, for example, may ask: why did you not believe me and make me go through an appeal process because of that but you do believe in the word of the Chinese state security service in very odd circumstances and timelines that you admit you had no direct access to or oversight of?
Make up your own mind: Watch The WADA Press Conference in Full …
The World Anti-Doping Agency Media Conference Recording
SOS Coverage of the New China Crisis:
Caution: Olympic Hotel Contamination May Contain Trimetazidine? We’d Be Nuts To Think So
ARD’s “Doping Top Secret – The China Files” – Parts 1-4 – Watch Why WADA U-Turn Is Urgent
The ARD China Files: Part 1 – SOS Analysis: Spies, Spice & Mass Contamination
ARD’s “Doping Top Secret – The China Files” – Parts 1-4 – Watch Why WADA U-Turn Is Urgent
The ARD China Files: Part 1 – SOS Analysis: Spies, Spice & Mass Contamination
The ARD China Files: Part 2 – SOS Analysis: On The Trail Of An Existential Precedent?