China’s Olympic Swimming’s Haul: More Medals, More Questions
After he won a bronze medal at the Paris Olympic pool on Friday night, the Chinese swimmer Wang Shun could no longer avoid the questions. He had declined to speak with journalists after his preliminary swims, but a medal meant a news conference. And a news conference meant there would be questions about Chinese doping.
“I think all of these test results have proven my innocence,” Wang said through a translator after the men’s 200-meter individual medley. He had been drug-tested an average of twice a week before China’s Olympic qualifying meet, he said, and 11 times in the two weeks before the Games began in Paris.
As the Olympic swimming competition drew to a close on Sunday, China won gold in the men’s 4×100-meter medley relay, edging the United States, France and Britain for only its second victory of the Games.
The winning Chinese relay team included two swimmers who had tested positive for banned drugs in 2021 but had never been disciplined for the positives. The result, and others at the Olympic meet, has left lingering distrust and unanswered questions after a string of revelations in recent months about dozens of positive drug tests among Chinese swimmers, which antidoping authorities claimed were from food contamination.
Much of the blame for how the positives were handled has been placed by athletes on the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, which did not publicize the positives or discipline the swimmers. The British swimmer Adam Peaty, whose team did not medal in the medley relay, said after the race that the antidoping system needed to be stricter and that the authorities in charge of keeping the sport clean should “wake up and do your job.”
A dozen Chinese swimmers known to have previously tested positive for a banned substance, including Wang, competed at the Paris Olympics. Wang and a member of the relay team that won on Sunday, Qin Haiyang, had also tested positive in 2016 and 2017 for a different drug. Each time, they were not disciplined after Chinese antidoping authorities also blamed food contamination.
The relay gold was one of 12 medals won by Chinese swimmers in France, double their total at the Tokyo Games three years ago. But that total has come up short in the measure that China and many countries use to judge their Olympic performance: gold medals.
In that accounting, Chinese swimmers in Paris, who won only two events, lagged behind both their results from Tokyo (when they won three) and their lofty expectations.
Skepticism about their performances, however, remains. The International Olympic Committee has said that the Chinese swimmers have been the most tested of any team in their sport at these Games. The Chinese freestyler Yang Junxuan, who like Wang and Qin previously tested positive on two occasions, said that their results while being so frequently tested should speak for themselves.
Any number of factors — training, age, the distraction of increased testing — could have affected the team’s results, but one clear takeaway from these Olympics is that the new reality for Chinese swimmers is that they will be tested more often and that their success will continue to be scrutinized.
Some of that scrutiny was directed toward Pan Zhanle, who led the Chinese relay to victory on Sunday and won the men’s 100 freestyle on Wednesday in world-record time — one of only two individual world records set in the Paris pool.
After Pan finished more than a second ahead of the silver medalist, the swim coach and former Australian Olympian Brett Hawke suggested in a social media video that it was “not humanly possible” to win the Olympic final of a sprint event by a body length. Pan also anchored the men’s 4×100 medley relay, an event the United States lost for the first time at an Olympics. Pan secured a second gold for China with a freestyle split that was more than a second faster than any of his competitors.
The 19-year-old Pan, though, is not among the swimmers known to have tested positive for a banned substance. After his 100 freestyle race, he said that he had been tested 21 times from May through July. His teammate, Zhang Yufei, who earlier in the meet said that she was worried that competitors and fans would look at the Chinese swimmers differently, called the scrutiny on Pan unfair.
“Why do Chinese athletes need to be suspected when they swim really fast?” Zhang said through a translator after winning the bronze in the women’s 200 butterfly. “Michael Phelps, when he won seven or eight gold medals: Why was he not suspected or challenged?”
Wang and Zhang, who added six medals (but no golds) to her résumé in Paris, were both among the 23 Chinese swimmers who The New York Times reported tested positive for the prescription heart medicine trimetazidine, or TMZ, before the Tokyo Olympics but were secretly cleared and allowed to continue competing. Zhang won four medals in Tokyo, including two golds. Wang won the 200 I.M. at those Games.
Wang was also one of three Chinese swimmers who had tested positive several years earlier for a different banned substance, along with Yang and Qin. Qin, who specializes in the breaststroke, turned in one of China’s most disappointing individual performances in France, failing to win a medal in either of the breaststroke events that he won at last year’s world championships. In the 200 breaststroke, an event in which he holds the world record, Qin failed to make the final, which he attributed to putting too much pressure on himself.
Last week, The Times reported on a third previously undisclosed incident in which two Chinese swimmers, including one who swam in the heats for the women’s 4×200 relay team that won a bronze in France, tested positive for another banned drug in 2022.
In response, WADA acknowledged it had concerns about the number of doping cases that were being closed without discipline because it was not possible to challenge the assertion that the positive tests were the result of contamination.
Yu Yiting, who won two relay bronzes and finished fourth in the women’s 200 I.M., said in a translated interview that she was “quite surprised” when she found out that she tested positive for TMZ before the Tokyo Games. She said that the group of 23 swimmers, who Chinese authorities said ingested the banned substance from a tainted kitchen at a hotel where they stayed together for a meet, cooperated with the investigation, including reporting what they ate and used in the hotel.
Several of the Chinese swimmers who previously tested positive leaned on the same defense in Paris: that they had been cleared by international organizations, including WADA and World Aquatics, swimming’s governing body. Others declined to answer questions about doping, or were encouraged by members of China’s state media not to respond to queries on the topic made by foreign reporters in the mixed zone at the swimming venue.
In one interaction recorded by a Times reporter, a Chinese journalist, speaking in Mandarin, suggested to the swimmer Fei Liwei that he should just answer a question about doping by saying that the Chinese team is clean.
“They are the most tested,” Mark Adams, spokesman for the International Olympic Committee, said when asked if the Chinese swimmers were competing clean in Paris. “Can you ever say that with any team? Never 100 percent. But all the work is being done.”
Tariq Panja and Weiyi Cai contributed reporting.
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