WADA Declares Operation to Find Leak of Chinese Doping Scandal
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) this week has declared a named operation to find the leak of its handling of positive tests within the Chinese swim program in 2021.
WADA has launched what it has dubbed “Operation Puncture,” according to Director of Intelligence and Investigations Gunter Younger. He was quick to say that said operation is not seeking to unmask a whistleblower.
“We’re not chasing the whistleblower,” Younger told reporters at an event in London. “What we want to try to find out is how the leak happened and what was the motivation of the leak.”
The operation is the latest effort for WADA to exonerate itself over its handling of positive tests within a large segment of the Chinese swim program months before the Tokyo Olympics. A group of swimmers tested positive for trimetazidine, a performance-enhancing drug, during a training camp in Guangzhou in early 2021. The Chinese Anti-Doping Agency ruled the tests to be an incidental occurrence of environmental contamination, a decision that WADA quietly assented to. Those swimmers were allowed to compete at the Tokyo Olympics, and WADA apparently had no intention of making the case or its involvement in it public, at least not before said swimmers got a chance to compete in a second Olympics in Paris.
The information was revealed in the spring of 2024, in parallel investigations by the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD. WADA has strenuously maintained its innocence, even paying for an allegedly independent inspector who further exonerated it.
Operation Puncture is aimed, ostensibly, at finding out how the case reached the media. (It is energy WADA is not putting into deciphering how TMZ got into the bodies of the Chinese swimmers, an issue it feels is satisfactorily resolved.)
WADA’s handling of the case set off a firestorm of international controversy, including threats of pulled funding by the United States and other countries. The thin justification WADA is using for Operation Puncture is to determine if political motivation – not, perhaps, some search for public accountability – informed the leak.
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