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Michael Phelps, the most decorated athlete in Olympic history, has called for “one and done” lifetime bans for anyone caught doping, as the row over Chinese swimmers at the Games intensified on Tuesday.
Millions of Chinese took to social media to defend their athletes after one of their swimmers, Qin Haiyang, described doubts over their performances in the pool at the Paris Games as “a joke”.
Qin was part of China’s men’s 4x100m medley quartet who beat the United States to gold on the final night of the swimming competition on Sunday, ending 64 years of unbroken dominance by American men in the event.
After the race, Adam Peaty, whose British team finished fourth, caused a sensation when he said there was “no point winning if you’re not winning fair”.
Peaty added: “For me, if you’ve been on that and you have been contaminated twice, I think as an honourable person you should be out of the sport. But we know sport isn’t that simple.”
Peaty was referring to the controversy over 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a banned substance ahead of the Tokyo Olympics.
The results were not made public until media reports surfaced this year. It emerged the World Anti-Doping Agency had accepted the Chinese explanation that the positive tests were caused by tainted food. Nine of those 23 swimmers won medals in Paris.
There was huge scrutiny over Chinese performances in the pool, with former Australian Olympic swimmer Brett Hawke casting doubts over Chinese teenager Pan Zhanle in particular. Pan stormed to gold in the men’s 100m freestyle in a world record time aged just 19, though he is not one of the swimmers who failed doping tests.
Hawke, who represented Australia at the 2000 and 2004 Olympics, said on Instagram: “It is not humanly possible to beat that field by a body length. I don’t care what you say. This is not a race thing, this is not against any one particular person or nation, this is just what I see and what I know.”
Hawke’s comments have now been criticised by Dennis Cotterell, another Australian, who together with his partner Bronwyn Henderson has been coaching Pan for the last 18 months.
Cotterell told The Age: “Brett’s speciality is the 50m, this is the 100m. Biochemists, real researchers, will analyse Pan, like they do every Olympic champion, because they want to see what the best are doing. And they will see that he is doing something different.
“It is unique to him. It is idiosyncratic. But Brett can’t see it.”
Cotterell added that the Chinese swimmers were subjected to more scrutiny than any other nation. “What they have been subjected to, in their efforts to be clean, Australians wouldn’t tolerate it,” he said.
However, Phelps, who won 23 Olympic gold medals in his career, called for tougher sanctions on dopers and said he did not believe the Chinese swimmers who tested positive should have been allowed to compete in either Tokyo or Paris.
“If you test positive, you should never be allowed to come back and compete again, cut and dry,” Phelps said. “I believe one and done.”
He added: “If everybody is not going through that same testing, I have a serious problem because it means the level of sport is not fair and it’s not even. If you’re taking that risk, then you don’t belong in here.”
Phelps added that he had had doubts about some of his rivals during his career.
“I don’t think I ever competed in an even playing field or a clean field,” he told AP. “I have some speculations of some athletes that I competed against that I thought they were [doping]. But that’s out of my control.”
“It does break my heart to see people put hard effort into four straight years to prepare for an Olympic Games, then to have it taken away from them by somebody who is cheating,” Phelps said. “It’s not right. I stand for that and I will always stand for that.”
After Qin’s defiant message on Monday saying: “Any doubt is just a joke. Stress only makes us stronger” Chinese fans flooded social media, particularly Weibo.
The hashtag “China winning gold medal at 4x100m medley relay” was viewed 760 million times on the platform with one comment, which read “China’s gold medal are squeaky clean, we won it with our competence!”, racking up more than 8,000 likes.
Both Peaty and his girlfriend’s Instagram accounts have been flooded with angry comments in the last 48 hours.
“Curious why you’re only attacking China but none of the other countries that won ahead of you as well… pretty weird,” read one comment.
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