Teen Sensation Ye Shiwen Defended By IOC – Cliff Notes
Organizers of the London Olympics and the governing body of swimming leapt to the defense of teen sensation Ye Shiwen.
Sport’s president said suspicions that China’s world record-breaking teen sensation Shiwen doped were “crazy” and motivated by jealousy and the IOC stressing its confidence in the drug testing program.
“We need to get real here,” said International Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Adams. “These are the world’s best athletes competing at the very highest level. We’ve seen all sorts of records broken already all over the place.”
Top five athletes in each event, in addition to two others, are tested as part of “a very, very strong drug-testing program, and we are very confident if there are cheats we will catch them,“ Adams said.
“We can’t stop speculation. It is inevitably a sad result of the fact that there are people who dope and who cheat,” Adams said. “It’s very sad we can’t applaud a great performance. Let’s give the benefit of the doubt to the athletes.”
Teen Sensation Ye Shiwen Defended By IOC – Video
The Chinese swimmer won the 400-meter individual medley on the opening day of the Olympic swimming competition and sliced through the last lap of the 400 in 28.93 seconds, which was faster than the 29.10 American winner Ryan Lochte posted in the last 50 of the men’s race.
John Leonard, head of the American Swimming Coaches Association, was among those openly questioning legitimacy of Ye Shiwen. Leonard was quoted him as saying the last 100 of her race “was reminiscent of some old East German swimmers.”
“History in our sport will tell you that every time we see something, and I put quotation marks around this, ‘unbelievable,’ history shows us that it turns out later on there was doping involved,” Leonard was quoted as saying.
“It’s a big mistake,” FINA president Julio Maglione said of Ye’s doubters. “The people that said this is crazy.”
Maglione added he has absolutely no suspicions about Ye and said FINA spends $1 million to drug-test the top 30 swimmers in the world two or three times a year and “swimming is absolutely clean.”
“Some people are just biased,” the official Xinhua News Agency quoted the anti-doping chief for China’s General Administration of Sport, Jiang Zhixue, as saying. “We never questioned Michael Phelps when he bagged eight gold medals in Beijing.”
Sebastian Coe, head of the London organizing committee, said it would “very unfair to judge an athlete by a sudden breakthrough.” “What you tend to forget is probably the 10 years of work that’s already gone in to get to that point,” he said on ITV News. “You need to look back through her career. I think you’ve got to be very careful when you make judgments like that, but, yes, it is an extraordinary breakthrough.”
“Drug testing procedures in place at the London 2012 Olympics are extremely rigorous, and the storage of samples for eight years after the games makes doping a very high-risk strategy,” John Brewer, a board member of UK Anti-Doping and director of sport at the University of Bedfordshire said. “We should not be surprised by exceptional performances since gold-medal winning athletes are inevitably different to the rest of us due to their talent, training and lifestyles.”
Ye Shiwen Achievements in 2011-2012
- 2011 Chinese Nationals – 1st 200 m individual medley; 1st 4×200 m freestyle relay
- 2011 World Aquatics Championships – 1st 200m individual medley
- 2012 Olympics – 1st 200m individual medley; 1st 400m individual medley
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