Star Wars: What Happens When Swimming Custodians Leave Athletes To Defend Clean Sport

Editorial

Swimming Australia‘s website has been under attack all week, according to news reports Down Under, in the wake of Mack Horton telling Sun Yang* that he was giving none of his time nor time to “drug cheats”.

High profile Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are said to be on the rise. Swimming Australia’s site is accessible but in the background is on automatic protection mode to determine if users are genuinely trying to come and read news, profiles and access information for meets and so on.  If malice aforethought designed to overload servers is suspected, access is denied.

Imagine that. An Australian swimming website under attack from folk unknown, perhaps nutcase sitting seething in their bedrooms, or perhaps the kind of folk who watch visitors from behind the mirror in the hotel room and escort you around to set-piece situations in the sporting realm in the back of a car you cannot leave without someone on the outside opening the door for you because there are no handles on the inside, presumably because it wouldn’t do if you wandered off and opted for the ‘independent’ tour instead.

Imagine that. A swimmer tests positive for banned substances. His nation’s swimming authority seeks to hide the case by imposing no penalty and failing to report the incident in the timeline required under reporting deadline restrictions of the WADA Code and eventually gets told by FINA “you must impose a penalty”. And so they do: a token three months is given. It will never be served, for the swimmer swam on and won three gold medals at the Asian Games two months before the details of his case started to emerge.

Sun Yang in Rio – by PBK

Imagine that. The swimmer, the Chinese Swimming Association and Dr Ba Zhen, not to mention Chinada and others, all know about the case, dated May 2014. Come September, no action has been taken and the swimmer not only races to ‘honour’ at the continental showcase but does so with Dr Ba at his side, right there on the poolside. Photos are taken to prove it. The Chinese swim authorities will later say that the Dr was not on their list of official accreditations. And yet, there he is poolside in Incheon with Sun. Dr Ba has been there throughout Sun’s career: he was a China team doctor at a home Games in Beijing and then again in London when Sun raced to two Olympic titles, over 400 and 1500m freestyle. Dr Ba, says Chinese sources, is one of several doctors that have been deciding what substances, legal or otherwise at any given point of time, might hep the swimmer cope with his workload in light of a heart condition. Triamterene is prescribed for “several years” before it was placed on WADA’s banned list but neither Chinada nor anyone else sees what… well, all other teams in the world (and all the way down to … me, and other journalists who write about such things) had seen, namely the WADA statement on its website and accompanying warnings that the substances was about to go ‘red alert’.

Imagine that: FINA get China to impose a three-month penalty and all is well … Sun – three months (though retrospective so a token …

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