SWIMMING IS HAVING A CYCLING MOMENT OF CRISIS
Chinese officials and the World Anti-Doping Agency covered-up evidence that Chinese swimmers used drugs. It’s the excuses that are laughable.
In 2010, Alberto Contador, a winner of all three Grand Tours, failed a drug test that found he was using clenbuterol, which helps horses who suffer from asthma breathe more easily. It also can help human athletes build muscle and lose weight.
After the failed test, Contador, then riding for Team Astana, said that he did not knowingly use the drug and that this was a “clear case of food contamination.”
Wait, what? Contador claimed he ate food that was contaminated with an illegal performance enhancing drug. The food in question — steak.
From a public relations play, it was smart. His excuse for the trace amounts of the drug in his system allowed Contador to do two things at once: Blame someone else and come up with an alternate story.
What basically happened is that the hotel food was unappetizing so a team official bought steaks in northern Spain and delivered them to the team in France for a meal on a rest day during the 2010 Tour de France.
Contador and other riders ate the steak, but none of the other riders failed the drug test.
After a protected legal fight, Contador was suspended and stripped of his win at that year’s Tour de France and Giro d’Italia.
Last month, the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD reported that 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for an illegal performance enhancing drug ahead of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 (the games were pushed back a year due to Covid.)
The Times got its hands on the Chinese investigators’ report, which found that at the end of 2020 and early 2021, Chinese swimmers were staying at a hotel for a swim meet in China.
“Two months after the swimmers tested positive for the banned substance — a prescription heart drug that can enhance performance — Chinese investigators reported finding trace amounts of the substance in the hotel’s kitchen.”
Unlike Contador, the trace amount of the drug was not in the food, but in the “sink drains, spice containers and cooktop vents in the kitchen of the Huayang Holiday Hotel in Shijiazhuang.”
The Chinese swimmers tested positive for the drug, trimetazidine, or TMZ, which helps patients with heart disease, and they went on to win medals and some swimmers will compete in Paris in 2024.
First, this is great reporting from the New York Times and the German broadcaster ARD. (It’s worth reading the entire story.)
Second, this is a classic case where a cover-up of the initial infraction has made everyone look even more corrupt. Not only did Chinese officials sweep the positive test results under the rug, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) covered-up the cover-up. There’s no sufficient explanation and plenty of hypocrisy (WADA acted forcefully when a Russian figure skater ahead of the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing and suspended her for four years for failing a test for the same drug.)
Third, when it comes to doping and using other performance enhancing drugs in cycling, my attitude had been to regulate it rather than try to ban it. But I think I’ve been wrong. Cheating is like a roof that leaks. The water always finds a way into your ceilings just as athletes seek to find any advantage to improve their performance.
The only thing that might work is a new roof. Countries and sports governing bodies should impose penalties on athletes that are so severe—jail time, exorbitant fines, lifetime bans—that they deter athletes from making the choice to cheat.
Of course, such a legal regime must include due process; no kangaroo courts.
I don’t want to single out Contador.
Cycling has a long history of cheating. At the 1967 Tour de France, Tom Simpson, the first British rider to wear the yellow jersey, died from a combination of amphetamines and heat while climbing the incredibly steep Mont Ventoux.
A massive drug scandal at the 1998 Tour de France destroyed that year’s race and damaged the sport. The scandal started when French police found copious amounts of drugs in the car of the Festina team’s masseur. Race officials expelled the entire team from the race after several stages.
Cycling’s governing body, the UCI, was found have given Lance Armstrong preferential treatment and bent its rules to excuse or overlook potential use of performance enhancing drugs.
In 1999, the UCI allowed Armstrong to provide a backdated prescription for cortisone after he tested positive for the drug. At the 2001 Tour of Switzerland, Armstrong was tested five times and the report, while negative, found a “strong suspicion of the presence of recombinant erythropoietin.”
While cheating has always been part of cycling, it’s those blood doping and steroids scandals of the 1990s and 2000s, which inextricably linked cycling and cheating, and have caused many fans to doubt—by varying degrees—what they were seeing.
However much the sport has moved on, and it has, it is still tethered to the past.