In the middle of 2020, the World Anti-Doping Agency’s investigative unit sent the agency’s top officials a report containing a stark warning based on an interview it had conducted with a doctor who had worked in China’s sports ministry.
The doctor claimed that China had been running a state-backed doping program for decades, a potential nightmare scenario for the Olympic movement, which was still recovering from a Russian doping scandal that had rocked the Games.
And while the doctor’s information was years old — she had defected in 2017 — it was specific. Among the ways Chinese athletes were cheating, she said, was by taking undetectable amounts of a little-known prescription heart medication, trimetazidine, or TMZ, which can help increase stamina, endurance and recovery.
The investigative unit’s decision to pass its warning up to the agency’s leaders was unusual, and the unit put China on a special watch list of countries to receive extra scrutiny, given the concerns raised by the doctor, who, the investigators felt, was credible.
The report proved prescient: Seven months after it was submitted to the antidoping agency’s leaders, 23 elite Chinese swimmers tested positive for TMZ after competing at a national meet in China.
But when the agency, known as WADA, learned of the positive tests, top leaders did not crack down on China. Instead, they sidelined the investigative unit, choosing not to tell its investigators and analysts that the swimmers had tested positive, ensuring the matter would not be looked into any further.
The decision by the agency’s leaders to keep its own investigators in the dark raises new questions about WADA’s response to repeated incidents of possible doping by Chinese athletes.
And it creates new doubts about whether WADA meaningfully changed its operations and culture after its credibility was called into question by the discovery in 2015 that the agency failed to stop a Russian state-sponsored doping program that had operated without detection for years.
In the China case, WADA’s top lawyers — including its director of legal affairs, Julien Sieveking, and the agency’s top outside lawyer and now general counsel, Ross Wenzel — secretly cleared the 23 swimmers of wrongdoing.
That decision, first disclosed in April by The New York Times and the German broadcaster ARD, allowed the swimmers to keep competing without further investigation or penalty even though the agency’s own scientists — operating separately from the investigations unit — were dubious of China’s explanation.
The Chinese claimed that the swimmers had been unwittingly contaminated with trace amounts of TMZ through a kitchen that served them food at a meet held in preparation for the Tokyo Olympics. The Chinese were never able to explain how the drug got into the kitchen.
Some of the swimmers who tested positive went on to win medals at the 2021 and 2024 Summer Olympics, including four golds. One of the swimmers, Zhang Yufei, won six medals at the 2024 Paris Games, more than any other athlete who competed there.
This article is based on interviews with current and former top antidoping officials, emails and an examination of internal WADA documents. The people all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution from the agency.
In a statement, WADA confirmed that it had walled off its investigative unit from dealing with the positive tests for TMZ among the Chinese swimmers. The agency said that decision was warranted because “a thorough legal and scientific review of the facts, including by external legal counsel,” showed “no basis to challenge the contamination explanation” offered by the Chinese.
“So there was no reason to refer the matter to WADA I&I at that stage,” the agency said, using the abbreviation for the unit, intelligence and investigations.
But several antidoping experts said that at the very least, WADA should never have accepted China’s explanation for the swimmers’ positive tests at face value, especially given the information in the investigative report and the investigative unit’s decision to put China on a watch list for precisely that kind of violation.
The agency has been under intense scrutiny since The Times revealed details of how Chinese swimmers repeatedly tested positive for various banned drugs yet were able to avoid being suspended pending a further investigation, the norm for handling positive doping tests.
The White House is holding up U.S. funding for WADA as it presses the agency to do a full audit of its operations — an issue the agency hopes to resolve this week at a meeting of its top officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And members of both parties in Congress have assailed WADA for failing to ensure a level playing field in global sports and threatened to cut future funding.
The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have opened an investigation into how the antidoping authorities and sports officials allowed the Chinese swimmers to escape scrutiny. This week, WADA disclosed to its executive board that the Justice Department had requested all files it had related to the positive Chinese tests, including Chinese antidoping officials’ decision to not discipline the swimmers, according to a person familiar with the matter.
But WADA told its executive board that it declined to produce the documents because it would set a dangerous precedent, the person said.
The allegations from the Chinese doctor, Xue Yinxian, surfaced in April 2017 when ARD aired an interview with the doctor, who said 10,000 Chinese athletes had been doped as part of an organized program, including some as young as 11.
Nearly all of the country’s most accomplished athletes, the doctor said in the interview, were using banned drugs.
The doctor, who sought asylum after speaking out about doping and fleeing China, told the television channel that “anyone against doping damaged the country and anyone who endangered the country now sits in prison.”
In response to the accusations she made in the interview, WADA’s newly formed investigations and intelligence unit opened an inquiry and ultimately interviewed the doctor.
In that interview, she laid out her allegations in considerable detail and went further than what she had initially told the German broadcaster. She said that among the banned substances being used in China were two that were well known and popular among athletes seeking an unfair advantage.
But she also mentioned a third drug that was far less known at the time, trimetazidine, and said Chinese athletes were using it in undetectable levels. She acknowledged, however, that she had not witnessed any doping firsthand.
The unit was limited in how it could proceed because it is extremely difficult for outside investigators to freely operate in China. But in an attempt to verify the doctor’s allegations, WADA, with the help of the International Olympic Committee, retested urine samples provided by Chinese athletes that had been saved from the 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics. Those tests all came back negative.
Without any more evidence to back the doctor’s claims, the investigation sputtered. The investigative unit’s leaders were still sufficiently concerned, though, and they documented the doctor’s account in the investigative report given to the agency’s executive committee in mid-2020, concluding that if any new information or evidence surfaced, they would reopen the case.
The decision to send the investigative report to the agency’s senior officials was unusual for the unit, as it rarely received such specific information from an individual about a world power.
The intelligence and investigations unit was in many ways created for just such a scenario after the 2015 revelation that Russia had for years engaged in a doping program that corrupted scores of international sporting events and several Olympic Games.
A former German police official, Günter Younger, was named to run the unit, which was empowered to step in whenever credible allegations were made and ensure that another state-run doping program would not be missed.
“It has happened in one country. I think it would be naïve to think it’s the only country,” Olivier Niggli, the agency’s director general, told The Associated Press when the unit was created. “We have to have our eyes really open and also make sure we act on intelligence and information we might get.”
But interviews and documents show that, even as warning signs piled up, WADA did not heed the intelligence passed along by the investigative unit when it came to China.
In fact, the unit learned of the positive tests only after the Chinese swim team had returned home triumphantly from the Tokyo Olympics in the summer of 2021 and after it was alerted to them by another antidoping agency.
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