Achi news desk-
The Olympic rings are placed in Trocadero plaza which overlooks the Eiffel Tower in Paris.Michel Euler/The Associated Press
In the midst of a record number at the Tokyo Olympics, Canada’s women’s swimming team suffered one disappointment – ​​the 4×200-metre freestyle relay.
Canada had taken bronze in the event at Rio 2016 and again at the 2019 world aquatics championships. The team was looking good for another medal.
On the day of the final, a Chinese team that was not considered a contender surprised everyone, winning in world record time. Canada came fourth.
A fighting result, but still disappointing. It looks a little worse than that now.
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that nearly half of China’s swimming team failed a drug test seven months before the Tokyo Games. Twenty-three swimmers tested positive for trimetazidine, or TMZ.
TMZ is a synthetic substance. You’re not going to pick it up because you picked the wrong hot dog vendor.
China was allowed to do its own investigation into the mass positive. That investigator determined that the athletes had been exposed to TMZ in tainted food at a team hotel. Exactly how so many of them swallowed it, while others did not, was not explained.
Unusually, no announcement was made about the positive tests, and no one was suspended pending the investigation. The World Anti-Doping Agency knew what was going on, but decided that the best way to determine if China had done anything wrong was to ask China to investigate it. When China gave China the all clear, WADA approved.
One of those who tested positive was Zhang Yufei. Zhang won three medals in Tokyo, one of them as part of the 4x200m relay team.
The swimming world is now playing doping jumps throughout those Games. The Canadian relay team is on a long list of unlucky losers. If China’s offense stuck, the medal table would look very different.
It would also have pushed Games who were on the brink closer to collapse. Few in Japan were particularly bothered about the world dropping en masse during what would become that country’s first mass COVID wave.
The main reason the Tokyo Games happened was that so much money had been spent, much more was still owed, and insurers were not willing to write 10 or 15 billion.
Fighting China in that uncertain moment couldn’t have seemed like a great idea. Even more uncertain – the next Games, to be held six months later in Beijing.
As an event, at its absolute best, Beijing 2022 was going to be a very expensive bumper (as it was at all). It’s the kind of party that’s easy to call off.
You don’t need to be a Reddit obsessive to see what happened here. The Chinese swimming team was caught in the middle of the car, and the people in charge had to prioritize their response.
Priority No. 1 – the Olympic business.
Priority No. 2 – the Olympic ideals.
They chose money over fairness.
They are easy to hit now, so there are plenty of people. The head of the US Anti-Doping Agency said it was a “devastating stab in the back of clean athletes.”
(Is it possible to be stabbed in the back without injury?)
The most sticky criticism concerns Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva. He also tested positive for trace amounts of TMZ before the Olympics. She also had one of those ‘maybe the dog gave me steroids’ excuses.
But since everyone hates Russia, Valieva didn’t have the benefit of an inside probe. She was dragged upside down and back through the world press and stripped of her medals. That’s your fairness.
It is fitting that WADA gets a reputational knock here. That is its most useful function – absorbing the fury of stakeholders after another goal has been scored by the Drug Police.
But out in the real world, nobody cares. Of course the Olympics are dirty. The Olympics have spent the last half century reminding us of that time and time again.
Between the Games, the Olympics only make news in two ways – ‘X’s host city is about to have serious second thoughts’ and ‘So cheated their way to gold.’
These stories have become so numerous that the only people who register them are those who make their living in business related to the Olympics, such as sports administration or the media.
Those people are happy to complain – complaining is good for business – but they don’t want things to change. Change is dangerous. Who knows where change will take you?
In this particular case, real change in the form of zero tolerance could have hobbled one Olympics and canceled the next. Then what?
You start canceling the Olympics and people learn to live without them. Sponsors find new things to sponsor. Broadcasters move on.
Better to compromise. Chinese swimmers made a bit of TMZ. So what? Figure skaters, tennis players, frogmen – everyone’s doing it these days. It’s like weed to the Marx and Engels crowd.
With all that in mind, here’s something you won’t often read in this space – WADA made the right call.
It’s not like he’s going swanning off to Guangdong province in early 2021, right in the teeth of the pandemic, to find out what was what. The only way to get any kind of answers was to rely on Chinese researchers. How do you know if they are on the up and up? You don’t. WADA had two choices – take China’s word for it, or go to ground immediately before the two thinnest games in history.
The proof that WADA made the right choice is that those Games happened. He might make a different call now, and that might be okay, too.
As far as fairness goes, it doesn’t belong in this conversation.
If a Belgian or Tanzanian is caught cheating, don’t bother asking for consideration.
American? Probably not.
American everyone knows? Maybe.
Everyone knows many Americans? Let’s talk.
This cannot be discussed because once that discussion takes place, it points to the kind of change that no current stakeholder wants to think about. If someone who tests positive can talk their way out of it and fairness is the goal, isn’t it fairer to stop testing altogether?
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