Had a belly full. Could Chinese swimmers have eaten 5 kilos of food en route to failed doping test?
The head of the US Anti-Doping Agency told senators that Chinese swimmers would have had to eat around 11 pounds (5 kilograms) of food to test for the amounts of the performance enhancer that resulted in the much-debated positive drug tests from 2021 that were later disregarded.
'It's unbelievable to think that Tinkerbell just showed up and sprinkled it all over the kitchen,' Travis Tygart said in a Senate hearing Tuesday focused on the World Anti-Doping Agency's response to the doping case. A key part of that case was WADA's acceptance of the explanation from Chinese authorities that the swimmers had been contaminated by traces of the drug Trimetazidine (TMZ) in a hotel kitchen.
USADA scientists analyzed data from a report commissioned by WADA to come up with the amount of food (5 kilos) or liquid (4.9 liters) the athletes would have had to have consumed to test positive at the levels they did.
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WADA officials declined to participate in the hearing, which spokesperson James Fitzgerald called 'another political effort led by Travis Tygart … to leverage the Senate and the media in a desperate effort to relitigate the Chinese swimming cases and misinform athletes and other stakeholders.'
Also testifying was former US drug czar Rahul Gupta, whose decision at the start of this year to withhold $3.6 million in funding–the biggest single chunk that WADA receives on an annual basis–furthered a long-running feud between US and WADA authorities. The Senate subcommittee holding the hearing is considering a bill that would give the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy–the so-called drug czar–permanent authority to withhold those funds without needing year-to-year permission from Congress.
In his prepared testimony, Gupta compared WADA's governance challenges to a used car. 'You expect that the car has been thoroughly inspected, that it's safe and roadworthy,' he said. 'But as soon as you drive it off the lot, the brakes fail and the engine sputters–and only then do you learn that the dealership has a history of skipping inspections altogether.'
Gupta and Tygart recommended a host of reforms for WADA, most of which revolve around ensuring independence, which they say cannot be accomplished under the current model that calls on the International Olympic Committee to supply half of WADA's money. Gupta also pressed for the United States to regain a seat on WADA's executive committee that it lost in the aftermath of the dues flareup.
Also testifying was Katie McLaughlin, a member of the US 4x200 freestyle team that won a silver medal at the 2021 Olympics. The Americans finished second to a Chinese team that had two swimmers whose positives were erased after WADA declined to look further into the contamination case.
'It was devastating, honestly,' McLaughlin said of hearing the news about the doping case. 'I was taken aback and heartbroken. I spent a lot of my career trusting in the powers that be, and it was really sad to find out that's someone who could not be trusted,' meaning WADA.
The investigator WADA hired to look into the Chinese doping case ruled that WADA had acted reasonably in not pursuing the Chinese case but still called it 'curious' that the agency did not further pursue facts that didn't line up with the normal handling of contamination cases.
Fitzgerald, the WADA spokesperson, said the agency did in fact address some of the concerns in the report, especially about the way contaminations cases are handled. 'As highlighted by the Chinese cases and many others, the issue of contamination is real and growing, and it is crucial that WADA and its partners address it head on,' he said.
Tygart led off his testimony claiming the Chinese case had potentially impacted ninety-six medals from the 2021 and 2024 Olympics. WADA argued with that, with Fitzgerald reiterating the agency's long-held legal position that, given the complexities of the evidence, had it taken appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, it would have lost all of them.
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