Facing demands from two of the United States' most decorated Olympic swimmers, members of Congress on Tuesday expressed openness to withholding funds from the global regulator appointed to ensure a level playing field at the Olympics after it refused to hold accountable Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a banned drug.
In testimony before a House subcommittee, 23-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps and four-time Olympic gold medalist Allison Schmitt said it was unacceptable that the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, had paved the way for swimmers to win medals at the 2021 Games and compete in the upcoming Games in Paris.
Phelps and Schmidt, whose testimony was also attended by the United States' top antidoping official, said WADA's inaction sent a message to professional athletes, amateur players and children that doping will be tolerated. Phelps said such a lack of enforcement could ultimately ruin the Olympics.
“Frankly, if we let this go on much further, the Olympic Games may never happen,” Phelps said during a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.
The two swimmers' message was heeded by lawmakers from both parties, who said WADA could be at risk of losing funding from the United States, which gives it more money than any other country.
“Maybe if they’re not going to work, we shouldn’t even be funding them,” said Rep. Morgan Griffith, a Virginia Republican and the subcommittee chairman.
The hearing is one of the most significant steps taken by U.S. officials toward WADA since The New York Times reported in April that the agency and Chinese antidoping officials declined to discipline 23 top Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a banned drug in early 2021, allowing them to compete at the Games held in Tokyo that summer.
Chinese officials said the positive tests were the result of inadvertent contamination of the swimmers and involved trace amounts of the banned substance, a conclusion accepted by WADA but questioned by several antidoping experts.
The subcommittee leaders rebuked WADA President Witold Banka for refusing to testify. An empty chair and a microphone with his nameplate were placed next to the other witnesses.
Phelps, whose swimming career spanned five Olympic Games, told the committee he did not believe he had ever competed in a clean field internationally. Schmidt was a member of the US 4×200-meter freestyle relay team that finished second to China at the Tokyo Olympics. It was one of five events in which Chinese swimmers won three medals, including three golds, after testing positive for a banned substance a few months ago.
“We played hard,” Schmidt said of the U.S. team in his testimony. “We followed every protocol and accepted our defeat gracefully.”
He said that following the revelation of the Chinese athletes' positive tests, “their position on the podium will be a cause of concern for many of us, as they may have been affected by doping.”
WADA faces a growing crisis ahead of this summer's Olympics because of scrutiny over its handling of positive tests.
Some American athletes competing in Paris, including two-time Olympic gold medalist Lilly King, have said they do not trust they will compete on a fair playing field. Phelps, who like Schmidt is retired from competitive swimming, described WADA as “an organization that continues to prove it is either unable or unwilling to apply its policies consistently around the world.”
Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency and a vocal critic of WADA, recommended that the United States make it a condition of paying more than $3.6 million to the agency this year and said WADA should release its entire case file on Chinese swimmers.
He also proposed in his written testimony that WADA form an independent expert committee to review cases in which athletes have tested positive but their countries have declined to discipline them, in an effort to prevent what happened to the Chinese swimmers from happening again. Under current rules, even positive tests for athletes who have not been disciplined must be publicly disclosed.
In the case of the Chinese swimmers ahead of the 2021 Games, there was no public announcement of the positive tests, the swimmers were not punished, and they went on to compete at the Olympics without their competitors knowing that questions had been raised about their use of a banned substance.
Tygart also called for an audit of the agency.
The agency has stood by its handling of the positive tests. It has hired a former top Swiss prosecutor to investigate whether it did anything wrong or gave China favorable treatment, though U.S. officials, antidoping officials from other countries and athletes have questioned whether that probe will be truly independent. The findings of that investigation are expected to be released before the Olympics.
The Times reported in April that Chinese antidoping officials claimed the athletes should not be disciplined because trace amounts of the drug they tested positive for — a heart disease medication known as trimetazidine, or TMZ — had been found in the kitchen of a hotel where they were staying for a competition in late 2020 and early 2021.
Chinese officials concluded that the positive tests following the competition were the result of swimmers inadvertently consuming food contaminated with TMZ, although it was unclear how the drug, which comes in pill form, ended up in the diets of so many swimmers.
Despite rules requiring public disclosure of infection cases — even in cases where athletes are cleared of wrongdoing — China kept the positive tests secret. WADA, which is designed to help countries that don’t follow the rules, accepted Chinese officials’ explanations, didn’t conduct an on-the-ground investigation and refused to try to discipline the athletes.
The Times' revelations about the positive tests and WADA's behavior in response to them have raised questions around the world about the agency tasked with keeping the Olympics clean.
The most intense opposition has come from the United States, which has seen competition from China in swimming intensify. The Biden White House’s top drug official has demanded greater accountability and transparency from WADA, members of Congress have urged the FBI to investigate the matter, and lawmakers are considering whether to continue funding the agency.
In his prepared remarks to the committee, Schmidt described the lengths American athletes will go to to ensure compliance with antidoping rules, from urinating in front of drug testers to not using something as simple as a topical cream for dry skin if they aren’t sure of the ingredients in it.
“I even had a drug examiner come and sit next to me during a history test in college, because they would show up unannounced,” Schmidt said.
Phelps first testified before Congress on the issue in 2017, in response to the doping scandal during which a former Russian official publicly stated that the country ran a state-sponsored doping program that produced Olympic stars. Phelps said at Tuesday's hearing that he found it “unbelievable” to be talking about the same issue again seven years later.
“It is clear to me that all efforts to reform WADA have failed, and there remain deep-rooted systemic problems that threaten the integrity of international sport and the right of athletes to fair competition,” Phelps said.