China named a 31-member swim team for the Paris Games featuring six Olympic gold medalists on Tuesday, while a review continues of a doping case involving the country’s swimmers before the Tokyo Games in 2021.
China’s team for Paris includes Olympic women’s 200m butterfly champion Zhang Yufei and men’s 200m individual medley winner Wang Shun.
Eleven members of China’s team were implicated in the doping scandal, including Yufei and Shun, according to NBC News.
In April, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said it would send a compliance team to China to assess the country’s anti-doping program after confirming media reports that 23 swimmers had tested positive for a banned substance before Tokyo.
The swimmers had tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned heart drug that is known to improve performance.
China cleared the swimmers of wrongdoing before the 2020 Games, deciding the positive tests were the result of being inadvertently exposed to the banned substance through contamination, and WADA accepted its finding.
The handling of the case sparked criticism from national anti-doping authorities and a number of leading swimmers, who said it had undermined trust in the global anti-doping system.
American seven-times Olympic gold medallist Katie Ledecky said faith in the anti-doping system was at “an all-time low” in a TV interview last month.
“It’s hard going into Paris knowing that we’re going to be racing some of these athletes,” she said.
WADA vigorously defended its processes before announcing it would launch the independent review.
“It’s extremely frustrating for athletes to always have in the back of our mind that maybe this sport’s not fair,” Lilly King told Yahoo from the US Olympic swimming trials in Indianapolis.
China’s team also features men’s 100m freestyle world record holder Pan Zhanle and the 100m and 200m breaststroke world champion Qin Haiyang.
— With Reuters
