Ahead of Olympics, World Anti-Doping Agency faces a trust crisis

NEW YORK – Two months before the Olympics are scheduled to begin in Paris, the global agency tasked with policing doping in sports is facing a growing crisis as it fends off allegations it helped cover up the positive tests of Chinese swimmers who went on to compete – and win medals – at Tokyo 2020.

The allegations are particularly vexing for the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), which has long billed itself as the gold standard in the worldwide movement for clean sports, because they raise the spectre that the agency – and by extension the entire system set up to try to keep the Olympics clean – cannot be trusted.

Athletes are questioning whether Wada can be relied upon to do its job of ensuring there will be a level playing field in Paris, where some of the same Chinese swimmers are favourites to win medals.

In recent days, pressure on Wada has increased significantly, particularly from the United States, which is one of the agency’s chief funders.

On May 8, the Biden administration’s top drug official – who is also a member of Wada’s executive committee – sent a letter to Wada laying out how it needs to appoint a truly independent commission to investigate how the positive tests were handled and demanding that its executive board hold an emergency meeting within the next 10 days.

“Let me underscore the extreme concern I have been hearing directly from American athletes and their representatives on this issue,” the official Rahul Gupta, wrote in the letter sent on Biden administration letterhead. “The athletes have expressed they are heading into the Olympic and Paralympic Games with serious concerns about whether the playing field is level and the competition fair.”

That same day, the senator in charge of the sub-committee that provides funding to Wada, Chris van Hollen, said, “We need answers before we support future funding.”

The US contributes more to Wada’s budget – pledging more than US$3.6 million (S$4.88 million) in 2024 – than any nation. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) matches whatever the US gives.

On May 10, a congressional aide said that a bipartisan House committee investigating the Chinese Communist Party has begun looking into the positive tests.

American Lilly King, a double Olympic gold medallist, said she no longer trusts that Wada is doing its job to keep athletes who violate anti-doping rules out of the Games.

“I am not confident when I get up on the blocks that the people to my right and my left are clean,” she said on May 10. “And that’s really unfortunate, because that’s not something I should have to focus on while racing at the Olympics.”

The New York Times reported in April that Wada failed to follow its own rules after 23 elite Chinese swimmers all tested positive for the same banned drug in 2021. The drug – trimetazidine, known as TMZ – is a prescription heart medication, but it is popular among athletes looking for an advantage because it helps them train harder, recover faster and quickly moves through the body, making it more difficult to detect.

Two days after the article was published, Wada president Witold Banka and other top officials from the agency held a news conference during which they said they had no choice but to accept the explanation provided by China’s anti-doping agency for the positive tests. The Chinese agency claimed that all of the swimmers had inadvertently ingested the drug because they ate food from a kitchen contaminated by TMZ.

In the days that followed, Wada published a lengthy document that again tried to explain its decision. But neither move satisfied athletes, sports and anti-doping officials perplexed by Wada’s apparent unwillingness to pursue its own investigation of the positive tests. Within days of the news becoming public, however, Wada appointed a special prosecutor, Eric Cottier, to review its handling of the case. That decision, too, quickly drew criticism.

Cottier is a former attorney-general of Vaud, a Swiss region that has become the centre of international sports, and that is home to several sports organisations, including the IOC. But interviews showed Cottier had been nominated to lead the investigation by the Wada official who was in charge of auditing the agency’s intelligence and investigations department at the time the Chinese swimmers tested positive.

The auditor, Jacques Antenen, served as Vaud’s police chief under Cottier when he was Vaud’s attorney-general. In a telephone interview on May 3, Antenen said he had contacted Olivier Niggli, Wada’s most senior administrator, in the days after the disclosure of the positive tests to suggest that Cottier might be a good choice to lead the investigation.

Regardless of Cottier’s abilities and qualifications, his physical proximity to figures close to Wada, the IOC and the sports movement are problematic, governance experts said.

Cottier and Christophe de Kepper, the IOC’s director-general, were among the people who celebrated Antenen’s retirement from the police force at a party in 2022. The IOC contributes half of Wada’s annual US$40 million budget, matching government funding.

The celebration, which was featured in the police service’s in-house magazine, was first reported by the Associated Press. A caption with a picture of two of the men in the magazine reads, “Attorney-general Eric Cottier came to greet his old friend Jacques Antenen.”

A Wada spokesman, James Fitzgerald, said his agency had contacted Antenen first, to ask “if he knew of someone with the requisite credentials, independence and availability to carry out a thorough review of Wada’s handling on this case”.

“These attempts to slur the integrity of a highly regarded professional just as he begins his work are getting more and more ridiculous and are designed to undermine the process,” Fitzgerald said.

Current and former athletes are now asking for more testing worldwide heading into the Paris Games.

King said that when she learnt of the undisclosed positive tests, she felt as if this was a replay of her experience from the 2016 Rio Olympics, where she won 100m breaststroke gold over Russia’s Yulia Efimova, who had failed a drug test but was allowed to compete after the result was overturned on appeal.

Katie Meili, the bronze medallist in that race, said: “The positive tests are a concern, and that’s a bad thing. But even more concerning to me is that the international regulator is not doing its job.” NYTIMES