Sun to miss Games after ban cut to four years
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Sun Yang, 29, will be eligible to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics after serving his four-year ban.
PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
LAUSANNE • Chinese swimmer Sun Yang has had his eight-year ban for doping violations reduced to four years, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) said in a statement yesterday.
The decision means Sun will miss the Tokyo Olympics next month but will be eligible for the Paris Games in 2024.
Sun was banned for eight years by CAS in February last year after it accepted an appeal from the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) against a decision by swimming governing body Fina to clear him of wrongdoing for his conduct during a 2018 test.
Sun appealed that decision and the Swiss federal supreme court in December upheld the challenge against the CAS panel "on the grounds of bias of one of the arbitrators of the CAS".
CAS said a new panel, installed after the Swiss court decision, "found to its comfortable satisfaction" that Sun had committed two anti-doping rule violations when an unsuccessful attempt was made to collect blood and urine samples from him at his residence in September 2018".
It added: "The new panel considered that the circumstances surrounding the sample collection of September 4-5, 2018 merited a period of ineligibility at the lower end of the range: namely the addition of the three-month period (from 2014) to the four-year ban applicable in this second case."
Sun, the reigning world and Olympic champion in 200m freestyle, was banned after he and members of his entourage were found to have smashed vials containing blood samples taken at an out-of-competition test in September 2018. He had questioned the credentials and identity of the testers and has constantly proclaimed his innocence.
The 29-year-old, who won two gold medals at the 2012 London Games and another at Rio de Janeiro in 2016, is a controversial figure in the sport.
He served a three-month doping suspension in 2014 for taking the stimulant trimetazidine, which he said he took to treat a heart condition, while Australian swimmer Mack Horton called him a drug cheat at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Horton refused to share the podium with Sun at the 2019 world championships in South Korea.
REUTERS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE