Chinese doping scandal that has hung over these Paris Olympics as the events finished Sunday night.
China won the men’s 4x100-meter medley relay in 3 minutes, 27.46 seconds, with two of the four members on the team listed among 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive ahead of the Tokyo Olympics three years ago. The swimmers were allowed to compete after a Chinese investigation ruled that they consumed food that had been contaminated.
…
The New York Times reported last week that two more Chinese swimmers had tested positive, including one 2024 Olympian, for a banned substance in 2022 but were cleared by Chinese officials to compete.
The World Anti-Doping Agency stood by its decision to clear the 23 swimmers who tested positive for a banned heart medication.
The funniest part about this is that the people complaining are saying that Pan Zhanle couldn’t possibly swim that fast.
Except he did, beating his own world record, and then he swam even faster in the 4x100m medley… And he himself has never tested positive for doping, not even in the contamination case.
I don’t question why the countries that disproportionately fund WADA get a disproportionate amount of the TUEs for legal performance-enhancing drugs, nor do I question why those countries also coincidentally are top performers in athletics.
We’re going to see this more and more as our misconceptions surrounding Chinese athletic performance start being superceded by the rise in nutrition in China. Chinese teens are taller than they’ve ever been before as diets approach that of developed countries. Plus, don’t forget that China has had thousands of years of geographically-selective copulation (the high plains in Inner Mongolia, the mountains in Tibet, the dry desert in Xinjiang, the humid coastal South)… And it’s only recently that we’re seeing the results of real genetic mixing amongst that population.
There’s two environmental factors to pay attention to as well: China’s history of famines (which only ended in the 60s and had happened basically every few decades prior) may have selected for efficient processing of specific foods and China’s notoriously factory-oriented meat industry may lead to excess growth hormones in children.