Maria Sharapova.Credit: AP
The 23 positives were all recorded at the same time and place and traced to meals at a training camp, which is too wholesale and clumsy to fit into a conspiracy theory and lends itself to weight to the possibility of an unhappy accident. Traces were found of TMZ, but in such small quantities as unlikely to be performance enhancing.
That’s credible as far as it goes. But it doesn’t explain why the drug – devised as a medication for heart disease – was present at all in the training camp. And it doesn’t explain why details of this course of events, if so innocent, were buried away in archives unlikely to come again before human eyes, until they did.
It’s hard not to have to pinch your nose with your fingers now.
Then there’s the role of WADA, the international body. It accepted CHINADA’s explanation and did not insist even on provisional suspensions, as incurred by Australia swimmer Shayna Jack in 2019 after testing positive for a banned substance that she said she ingested unknowingly.
Jack was cleared by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to return to swimming two years later, but too late to make that year’s Tokyo Olympics. The 23 Chinese swimmers competed in Tokyo, and three won gold.
Anyone got any air freshener?
Hefty penalty: Austrlaian swimmer Shayna Jack.Credit: Getty Images
We’ve heard a lot in this country recently about the burden of proof. In defending its actions, WADA said it had no “scientific evidence and intelligence” to challenge China’s conclusions and was “not in a position to disprove the possibility that contamination was the source of TMZ”. In other words, it proceeded from a presumption of innocence.
But a distinctive feature of the anti-doping regime since it was formulated is so-called strict liability, which reverses the onus. Rather than obliging drug authorities to establish guilt, it demands that an athlete prove their innocence. Because of this, Jack was suspended. Despite this, two years later, the Chinese swimmers were not.
Won’t someone open a window, please?
And then WADA swept it all under the table anyway, transparency be damned. Even if there was nothing to see here, surely the worldwide anti-doping regulator had a duty to report that it had seen nothing? It is baffling that it has chosen to let this sleeping dog lie. Then again, China is a very big dog.
The thing about a bad smell is that sometimes it is only a fart. But it still needs to be cleared up.
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