In some ways, Sun Yang’s direction in life was fated from the moment his parents met, back in Zhejiang province sometime before his birth in 1991. To be an only child in a Chinese family with a father who had been a strong basketball player and a mother who had played high-level volleyball, both parents tall and athletic, both competitive: sport was always going to loom large in his life.
Sun got into the swimming pool to learn the sport at aged seven and has never really gotten out until Friday, when he was handed a staggering eight-year ban by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas). Sun is 28-years-old. The Cas ruling effectively finishes the career of a man who had rewritten the record books of the sport without ever once escaping the sense that he was just another representative of a regime that uses sporting success as a manifesto for power and prestige.
The CliffsNotes version of Sun’s career is phenomenal. The London Olympics contained such a deluge of stories and events that his gold medal in the 400m freestyle, breaking Ian Thorpe’s record in the process, was half overlooked. He was the first Chinese man to win an Olympic gold swimming medal but China’s involvement in the pool that summer revolved around the stunningly fast times posted by Ye Shiwen, the 16-year-old who won multiple gold medals and had to face down a storm of controversy, prompting her father to state that “western media has always been arrogant and suspicious of Chinese people”.
Sun’s medal was merely a sign of things to come. At the time of his banning this week, he had become the first swimmer in history to win gold medals at the 200m, 400m, and 1,500m events. Those feats elevated him to a revered figure within his own country but were greeted with open hostility and suspicion by his fellow competitors.
Tainted by suspicion
As early as 2014, the Chinese swimming association slapped a cursory three-month ban on Sun for a doping violation in which it was claimed he had taken a banned substance for an irregular heartbeat. They neglected to inform the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) until after the event. Everything Sun achieved subsequently was tainted by suspicion.
The animosity which developed between Sun and Mack Horton, the Australian distance specialist, had become full-blown hostility last summer, when Horton refused to take his place on the silver stand of the podium alongside Sun, who took gold, at the world championships in South Korea. Horton’s public snub caused outrage in China and praise from other swimmers: Britain’s Duncan Scott would follow suit after the 400m swim, provoking a visible anger from Sun, who was filmed snapping, in English: “I’m a winner ... you’re a loser.” The venerable Australian swimmer Dawn Fraser was among the chorus of voices praising Horton last year and pointed the finger at the international swimming body.
“The people who are letting these swimmers down are Fina [the International Swimming Federation]. They shouldn’t have allowed this guy to swim. He’s a drug cheat, we all know that. He got a security guy in to smash his blood vials. Why did they let this guy swim?”
More pertinently, now, is why Fina, tasked with rehabilitating a sport that has been ruined with episodes of drug-cheating, decided to side so readily with the swimmer’s story during its investigation into the bizarre night in September 2018 when Sun, voicing his dissatisfaction with both the testers and the results during an out-of-competition test conducted at his home, had the blood vials smashed by his security staff. Fina found that the sample was “not collected with the proper authorisation” and that the conduct of the doping control assistant had been “highly improper and extremely unprofessional”.
Vehemently disagreed
It was an interpretation with which Wada vehemently disagreed and which ignored the obvious questions around that night. If Sun knew he had nothing to hide, then why engage the testers in an argument that lasted for a staggering four hours and which culminated in the swimmer’s mother arriving at the house with a hammer.
Wada challenged the finding, appealing to Cas on the grounds that Sun had voluntarily refused to submit a sample and contravened the terms of the Wada code. They had requested a punishment of between two and eight years and Cas backed them to the hilt. On Friday, Twitter was flooded with valedictory messages from swimmers that Sun had defeated in the pool, including South Africa’s Chad le Clos, who questioned whether Fina would now look at erasing Sun’s achievements at Rio.
For his part, Sun took to social media to express his shock at the verdict, which is almost certainly genuine and claimed that he “believes” he is a clean athlete. He has vowed to appeal the Cas verdict in the Swiss federal court.
But that hearing is unlikely to take place before the Tokyo Olympics – should those games go ahead as planned. And anyway, Sun’s reputation won’t recover from this. The instant response from the swimming community has bordered on celebration. The ban will lead to the usual sanctimonious commentaries declaring that cheating has no place in sport.
Systematic doping programme
But at some point, you have to wonder whether Sun ever stood a chance of even thinking about how he wanted to “be” as a swimmer. When you are born into a country which such a warped attitude to doping violations, what were the chances of his emerging from his training programme without anything to hide? Sun’s ban is the longest given to any Chinese athlete since Fina banned Zhou Ming for life for his part in the systematic doping programme that defined Chinese swimming in the 1990s. But Zhou has been seen coaching Chinese swimmers at poolside repeatedly since then, including in the months before the Rio games.
And in the rush of medallists in the swimming pool over that week in Brazil, the story of Qing Wenyi, the promising 17-year-old who died in her sleep in the dormitory during a national training camp in Beijing, was almost forgotten. Precisely how the teenager died was never established because there was no autopsy. She had been good; good enough to win gold in the national youth 100m and 200m breast stroke. She was a prospect, no more.
China won 70 medals at the Rio games, 26 of those gold, but Sun was the only first-place podium finish in the swimming pool. The USA had 16 gold medals in the pool alone and 33 of its 121 medals claimed came from the pool. Those are the numbers that China are chasing in the uncertain and beleaguered race to Tokyo.
Sun is both casualty and culprit this weekend but China will move on, leaving the swimmer to deal with the reality: thousands of hours – his entire life, essentially, spent training in a swimming pool to win races which none of his fellow competitors saw as true and which ended in smashed glass and blood in his home. It’s a terribly murky and lonely and a horrible legacy for a young man to have to carry with him through the many decades ahead.
