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    Takeaways From Our Chinese Swimming Investigation

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    A doping case involving Olympic swimmers has left unanswered questions and raised new concerns about the actions of a global antidoping regulator.In the first days of 2021, seven months before the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics, 23 of China’s best swimmers tested positive for the same banned drug at a domestic meet.Chinese antidoping officials investigated and declared the case an unusual mass-contamination event that could be traced to the presence of a heart medication, trimetazidine, known as TMZ, in the kitchen of a hotel where the swimmers had stayed for a New Year’s event in late December 2020 and early January 2021.The World Anti-Doping Agency, the global authority that oversees national drug-testing programs, looked into the episode but then accepted that theory and allowed China to keep the results secret.All the while, the swimmers were allowed to continue racing, without suspensions or disqualifications. Some of the swimmers who provided positive samples went on to qualify for the Olympics, and to win medals — including three golds — for China. A few are favorites to win again at the Paris Olympics this year.The incident would have remained in the shadows, a secret known only to a select few, had details of one of the most curious episodes in swimming not made their way out of the sealed files of the organizations trusted to keep sports fair.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Track Will Be First Sport to Pay Olympic Gold Medalists

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      Winners in Paris will get $50,000 each from track and field’s governing body, as Olympic amateurism continues to fade away.Track and field will be the first sport to give direct cash payments for Olympic gold medals, the sport’s federation announced Wednesday.For decades, the Olympics trumpeted the ideal of amateurism. It took pride in being a competition where elite athletes battled for nothing more than the joy of representing their country.Amateurism was touted as the best way to keep sports clean, fair and honest. “Professionalism” was looked down on as vulgar and mercenary. But the notion of amateurism at the Olympics has eroded over the last three decades, as professional athletes have been allowed to participate.Now World Athletics, the global governing body for track and field, will break new ground by making payments to competitors more straightforward: All individual gold medalists in the sport at the Paris Games this summer will receive $50,000. (Winning relay teams will share the money.) The federation said it would begin paying silver and bronze medalists lesser amounts in 2028.The federation president, Sebastian Coe, a two-time gold medalist in the amateur era, called the decision “a pivotal moment for World Athletics and the sport of athletics as a whole, underscoring our commitment to empowering the athletes and recognizing the critical role they play in the success of any Olympic Games.”Mr. Coe is considered a leading candidate to be the next president of the International Olympic Committee, and could perhaps pave the way for an expansion of the payments to other sports.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kamila Valieva Banned Four Years Over 2022 Olympic Doping Case

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      Valieva, once a 15-year-old gold medal favorite, was punished in a doping case that upended the figure skating competition at the Beijing Games.Kamila Valieva, the teenage Russian figure skater whose positive doping test upended her sport at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, was banned from competition for four years on Monday by the top court in sports.The punishment, announced by a three-member arbitration panel empowered by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, was related to a tainted sample Valieva, who was 15 at the time, gave at a competition. The positive result only emerged two months later — in the middle of the Olympics, and only a day after Valieva had led Russia to victory in the team competition.The ban will be retroactive to Dec. 25, 2021, the arbitrators ruled, meaning it will end in 2025, just in time for Valieva to compete at the next Winter Olympics, in 2026. Now 17, she was ordered to forfeit “any titles, awards, medals, profits, prizes and appearance money” earned after her positive doping sample was collected.Valieva had claimed that she had mistakenly taken a heart medication, Trimetazidine, prescribed for her grandfather. Russia’s anti-doping body had cleared her of any wrongdoing, not because of her reasoning for ingesting the banned substance but because of her age, saying she could not be held responsible because she was a minor at the time, and therefore a “protected person.”The CAS panel, in Monday’s ruling, dismissed the premise that minors competing in adult competitions should be treated different from their rivals.“There is no basis under the rules to treat them any differently from an adult athlete,” the arbitrators wrote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More