Antidoping Agency Froze Out Investigators Who Warned About China

In the middle of 2020, the World Anti-Doping Agency’s investigative unit sent the agency’s top officials a report containing a stark warning based on an interview it had conducted with a doctor who had worked in China’s sports ministry.

The doctor claimed that China had been running a state-backed doping program for decades, a potential nightmare scenario for the Olympic movement, which was still recovering from a Russian doping scandal that had rocked the Games.

And while the doctor’s information was years old — she had defected in 2017 — it was specific. Among the ways Chinese athletes were cheating, she said, was by taking undetectable amounts of a little-known prescription heart medication, trimetazidine, or TMZ, which can help increase stamina, endurance and recovery.

The investigative unit’s decision to pass its warning up to the agency’s leaders was unusual, and the unit put China on a special watch list of countries to receive extra scrutiny, given the concerns raised by the doctor, who, the investigators felt, was credible.

The report proved prescient: Seven months after it was submitted to the antidoping agency’s leaders, 23 elite Chinese swimmers tested positive for TMZ after competing at a national meet in China.

But when the agency, known as WADA, learned of the positive tests, top leaders did not crack down on China. Instead, they sidelined the investigative unit, choosing not to tell its investigators and analysts that the swimmers had tested positive, ensuring the matter would not be looked into any further.