‘The Crooked Shadow’ : Chinese Swimmers, Under a Drug Cloud, Today Are Expected to Be Banned From Pan-Pacific Championships

After breaking the world record in the 10,000-meter run in 1993, Wang Junxia was sensitive to accusations that she and fellow Chinese women runners had used anabolic steroids to help their remarkable rise in international sport.

“China has an old saying,” Wang said then. “ ‘If you’ve done nothing wrong, then you don’t fear the ghost crying out at the door; if you stand upright, then you don’t fear the crooked shadow.’ ”

But fear is something Chinese sports officials have in abundance these days. Fear that their finely tuned sports machine that has taken over women’s track and field, swimming and weightlifting cannot withstand another drug scandal. Fear that as China struggles to become a geopolitical power, it has become a pariah among sporting nations.

Today in Honolulu, some of those fears could be realized when the four charter nations of the Pan-Pacific Swimming Assn.--Australia, Canada, Japan and the United States--are expected to take the highly unusual action of banning China from its prestigious championships this summer in Atlanta.

The proposed ban is the result of 11 Chinese, including seven swimmers, testing positive before and during the Asian Games last October in Hiroshima, Japan, igniting an international scandal. Two gold-medal winning female weightlifters tested positive a month later at the World Championships in Istanbul, Turkey, and were banned for life.

All but one of those positives were for a potent anabolic steroid, dihydrotestosterone, a drug long suspected of being used but undetected until the Asian Games.

Furthermore, a significant number of other Chinese athletes had elevated levels of dihydrotestosterone in their urine at the Asian Games but not enough to be declared positive.

Last year, 38 Chinese athletes, including 11 swimmers, tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Two world champion swimmers--Yang Aihua and Lu Bin--were caught and banned through the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Since 1988, 47 Chinese have tested positive for anabolic steroids.

“It is a big problem,” said a former Chinese swimmer living in the United States. “(Getting caught) was bound to happen. It had to happen. They’ve got to change.”

The swimmer, who asked not to be identified, refused to elaborate on what is happening in China’s sports programs.

“Maybe in 10 years, like the East Germans, the truth can be told,” he said. “I can’t. It’s too risky.”

Today’s decision in Honolulu no doubt has Chinese swim leaders fearing further ramifications in a sport in which their female athletes won 12 of 16 gold medals at last summer’s World Championships in Rome and all 15 titles in Hiroshima (although medals subsequently withdrawn).

“If they fairly view China’s anti-drug position . . . then the swimmers should not be banned,” said Yuan Jiawei, deputy secretary general of the Chinese Swimming Assn.

But in the last year, 11 Chinese swimmers tested positive while no other country had even one. Responding to an outcry from coaches and athletes, the International Swimming Federation (FINA) on Friday conceded it had a problem and proposed increased testing, stiffer penalties and an on-site investigation in China.

Yuan said Saturday that the Chinese will cooperate with the investigation to “clear up any problem.”

FINA had been slow in responding to the crisis, in part, because it could not conduct random, out-of-competition testing in China without getting a visa to enter the country. FINA is proposing to conduct about 300 more short-notice random tests than last year.

FINA also plans to convene an extraordinary anti-doping congress in late fall at the Short Course World Championships in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to consider increasing suspensions for first-time offenders.

Many in the swimming community called on leadership to ban China from the Rio championships, a position FINA is reluctant to take. Cornel Marculescu, the group’s executive director, downplayed the China drug scandal, not even acknowledging that his sport has a serious problem.

Speaking from Lausanne, Switzerland, last week, Marculescu also said that FINA is not concerned about the possibility of a country being banned from the Pan-Pacific Championships.

Others suggest swimming’s leadership is afraid to criticize the Chinese because it does not want to offend the International Olympic Committee, which governs the Olympic Games.

“Somehow, FINA thinks itself beholden to the IOC,” said Forbes Carlile, director of Australian Swim Coaches Assn. “Without the Chinese, it really punctures the marketability of the whole Games.”

Such skepticism was fueled because the first action FINA took during the Asian Games ordeal was to suspend its chief medical officer, Alan Richardson of Honolulu, for confirming news reports that China’s swimmers had tested positive. Richardson has since been reinstated, Marculescu said.

“This is not a game of being politically correct,” Carlile said from Sydney. “This is a game of protecting our swimmers from cheats.”

Said Janet Evans, America’s greatest distance swimmer: “As long as the IOC is adamant about not banning (China) from the Olympics, I don’t think anything will be solved. We can catch them one by one, but they will come up with another crop of swimmers.”

Jeff Rouse, the world record-holder in the 100-meter backstroke, has circulated a petition asking leadership to focus on drug testing. Rouse said he doesn’t want to look back in 20 years and discover that the Chinese used drugs, as was the case with East German athletes.

China has deflected the criticism by calling the Western swimmers racist. It had a similar reaction after criticism of Chinese female distance runners who began shattering world records with remarkable ease in the early 1990s.

But Rouse has a stronger reason for speaking out.

“The way we’re heading now, the performance at the Olympics in 1996 will be second billing,” he said. “It will be drugs. Every single performance will be questioned, no matter who it is by. That scares me.”

Although Chinese sports officials say they welcome the recent scrutiny, many in China are afraid to say what they know about the system.

One Chinese coach said he had been instructed to give this standard response to questions about drug use:

“These athletes (who tested positive) are on their own individual behavior. What happened had nothing to do with state policy, team doctors or coaches. Even if there is a doctor or a coach involved, it is the result of their own individual behavior.”

Although many have strong suspicions that China has adopted the East German model of a state-sponsored, systematic drug program, it is not that simple in such a vast country.

“The provinces might do one thing and the national team something else (as far as training and drug use are concerned),” said the former swimmer. “They have rivalries and don’t share secrets.”

But the recent spate of athletes testing positive came from different areas and different sports, indicating it is more than a regional problem.

“That our government or Olympic committee or national federations organize these things, for the time nobody can show,” said Wei Jizhong, head of the Chinese Olympic Committee. “From our side, we also have doubts. We have seven swimmers (caught). Why? We have to find out.”

One reason is pressure. The former swimmer said if athletes or coaches do not perform at a world-class level, they will be returned to the provinces, never to compete on the international stage again.

And it starts at a young age for the select few.

“As I know, most coaches would ask the parents when they send their children to sports teams or sports schools if they agree that we give drugs to their children,” he said.

So far, China is sending mixed signals about how it views the problem.

It punished Bai Lin, the Tianjin Track and Field Assn.’s coach of top Chinese discus thrower Qiu Qiaoping, who was caught at Hiroshima. Bai was suspended and called to Beijing for questioning. Qiu was sent home to the province of central Sichuan, where she awaits punishment.

But according to last week’s Asia Week, published in Hong Kong, the New People’s Sports Daily in Shanghai published a report about the Chinese athletes who tested positive in Hiroshima, and was “sharply criticized by the propaganda department of the Shanghai municipal government, and a deputy chief editor who had only been in his new job six months was demoted.”

No matter how careful they are, officials might be unable to stop revelations about the system. The first crack occurred last summer, when a technician from the IOC-accredited laboratory in Beijing made specific allegations against China’s program after seeking asylum in Canada.

The technician described to the Canadian Broadcasting System and L’Equipe, the French national sports daily, a floating anti-drug laboratory off the shores of South Korea during the 1988 Summer Olympics and cover-ups in Beijing.

“Thirty-eight positives in a variety of sports,” said Phillip Whitten, editor of Swimming World. “The notion that these reflect nothing more than individual (abuses) is absurd.”

Almond reported from Los Angeles and Tempest from Beijing.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Grounded

In the last two years, 11 Chinese swimmers have tested positive for illegal performance-enhancing substances. In the 22 years since testing began, only 10 other swimmers--from the rest of the world--have tested positive.

Name Drug Site Ban Xin Zhou Steroids World Cup 2 years Zhong Weiyue Steroids World Cup 2 years Bai Xiuyu Ephedrine World Cup 1 month Xin Ren Steroids Goodwill Games 2 years Yang Aihua Steroids Asian Games 2 years Lu Bin Steroids Asian Games 2 years Shou Guanbin Steroids Asian Games 2 years Xiong Guoming* Steroids Asian Games 2 years Hu Bin* Steroids Asian Games 2 years Zhang Bin* Steroids Asian Games 2 years Fu Yong* Steroids Asian Games 2 years

* Male