The Chinese and Olympic flags fly during the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. The World Anti-Doping Agency has cleared 23 Chinese swimmers of doping charges despite testing positive for banned substances, allowing them to compete in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
Petr David Josek/AP
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Petr David Josek/AP
The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into a sports doping scandal involving nearly two dozen top Chinese swimmers.
The Justice Department rarely comments on ongoing investigations, but two international sports organizations confirmed to NPR that a criminal investigation is underway.
In May, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers called for an investigation. “It is critical to assess whether these alleged doping practices were state-sponsored,” they said in a statement.
Justice Department officials did not respond to NPR’s request for comment, but one focus of the investigation appears to be the World Anti-Doping Agency, better known as WADA. The agency investigated repeated positive tests for two banned substances by several elite Chinese swimmers over a period of years. But it kept the test results secret and cleared the athletes for the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
Chinese swimmers to compete in Paris
Eleven of these Chinese athletes have now qualified for the Chinese national team and are expected to compete against American athletes again at the Olympic Games in Paris.
World Aquatics, which regulates international swimming competitions, said in a statement to NPR that its executive director, Brent Nowicki, has been subpoenaed “by the U.S. government” to testify in the case. “He is working to schedule a meeting with the government, which will most likely eliminate the need for grand jury testimony,” the World Aquatics statement said.
WADA also issued a statement saying it had handled the Chinese drug tests appropriately and was “disappointed” by the investigation.
The organization, headquartered in Montreal, Canada, accused U.S. officials of exceeding their authority in the case. “The United States claims to exercise extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction over participants in the global anti-doping system,” WADA’s statement said.
News of the positive test results first became public in April of this year.
The revelations led to international condemnation of WADA, the Chinese authorities and their decision to keep the doping cases secret.
‘People just get away with it’
WADA now says it has accepted the Chinese government’s explanation that repeated positive tests for performance-enhancing drugs by top swimmers were the result of accidental contamination.
American doping testing experts and many American athletes have rejected these statements.
Testifying before a U.S. House committee last month, Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps called for major reforms to the international system designed to catch athletes who use doping to cheat. “Right now, people are just getting away with anything,” Phelps said. “How is that possible? It doesn’t make sense.”
Travis Tygart, head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which monitors and punishes American athletes who cheat, testified that WADA has failed for years to properly punish Chinese and Russian sports teams that regularly use performance-enhancing drugs.
“Russia and China are too big to fail in [WADA’s] “They have a different view of the world and unfortunately face different rules than the rest of the world,” Tygart said.