Chinese Swimmer Zhang Yufei Makes First Comments on Doping Case
An Olympic swimming champion who was one of 23 Chinese athletes who tested positive for a banned substance before the last Summer Olympics said on Saturday that she and her teammates had been wrongly accused of doping and insisted that China would never allow any athlete to use performance-enhancing drugs.
The remarks by the swimmer, Zhang Yufei, were the first public comments by a member of the Chinese swimming team at the center of the doping scandal, which has brought anger, accusations and resentment to the Paris Olympics, the sport’s grandest stage.
“I don’t think any athlete, Chinese or non-Chinese, would want to destroy the work they built up every day over the years on doping,” Zhang said at the Olympic pool after a fast swim in a morning race on the opening day of the swimming competition. The Chinese government, she said, “also does not allow us to dope on purpose.”
Zhang offered her responses in an interview in Mandarin that was translated into English.
Zhang and her Chinese teammates tested positive for a banned substance at a domestic meet in early 2021, but they were allowed to continue competing, including at the Olympics later that year, after a Chinese investigation declared that the positive test was the result of accidental contamination. Zhang went on to win four medals in Tokyo — two gold and two silver — and helped break a world record with her freestyle relay teammates.
On Saturday, Zhang reiterated what the Chinese authorities and the World Anti-Doping Agency have claimed for months: that the positive tests for the banned substance, trimetazidine, a prescription heart medication, were the result of food contamination traced to a hotel kitchen. Chinese officials and WADA officials declined to punish the swimmers and kept the results secret, despite rules at the time that should have led to their public disclosure.
Zhang said the furor over the case had altered her relationships with competitors from other countries and cast her and her teammates in an unfair light ahead of the Paris Games.
“I really hope everyone will not look at the Chinese swimming team with tinted glasses,” she said. “Before last year, and before the scandal broke out, I got along really well with competitors from other countries. Now at this Olympics, I’m really worried that my good friends will look at me differently, that they would be unwilling to compete with me or watch me compete.
“I’m even more worried that the French public would think that Chinese athletes do not deserve to compete at this stage, so I feel very misunderstood.”
Zhang said the Chinese swimmers in Paris had been tested 20 to 30 times over the past two months, averaging three to four times a week. World Aquatics, swimming’s international governing body, provided similar figures, but Zhang’s claims were significantly lower than the testing figures reported in the Chinese news media, which had been claiming some swimmers had been tested several times a day.
Per World Aquatics, the testing rate for Chinese swimmers since the start of the year is four times more than that for Australian swimmers and an average of six times higher than the rate for U.S. swimmers.
Zhang spoke after advancing to the semifinals of the 100 butterfly, an event in which she won a silver medal at the Tokyo Games. She is entered in two other individual events, the 50 freestyle and the 200 butterfly.
Qin Haiyang, another of the swimmers who tested positive before the Tokyo Games, declined an interview request after swimming in the prelims of the 100 breaststroke.
Weiyi Cai contributed reporting.
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