China on Tuesday announced its 31-member swimming team, including six Olympic gold medallists, for the Paris Games, while investigations into doping cases involving the country’s swimmers continue ahead of the 2021 Tokyo Games.
China’s team for the Paris Games includes Zhang Yufei, the Olympic women’s 200m butterfly champion, and Wang Shun, the men’s 200m individual medley winner.
Eleven members of the Chinese team, including Yufei and Shun, were implicated in the doping scandal. According to NBC News.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in April confirmed media reports that 23 swimmers had tested positive for banned substances ahead of the Tokyo Games and announced it would send a compliance team to China to assess the country’s anti-doping program.
The players tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned cardiac drug known to enhance performance.
China denied any wrongdoing by its athletes before the 2020 Olympics and attributed the positive tests to inadvertent exposure to banned substances through contamination, a conclusion accepted by WADA.
The handling of the case drew criticism from national anti-doping agencies and many top swimmers, who said it undermined confidence in the global anti-doping system.
Seven-time U.S. Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky says she has little faith in the anti-doping system “The worst ever” In a TV interview last month.
“It’s tough heading to Paris knowing I’ll be competing against these guys,” she said.
WADA strongly defended its process before announcing it would launch an independent investigation.
“It can be very frustrating for an athlete to always have that feeling in the back of their mind that the sport may not be fair.” “I’m not sure what to do,” Lilly King told Yahoo! from the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials in Indianapolis.
China’s team also includes Pan Zhanle, the world record holder in the men’s 100m freestyle, and Qin Haiyan, the world champion in the 100m and 200m breaststroke.
— Reuters
