PARIS, August 9. /TASS/. President of the International Olympic Organization (IOC) Thomas Bach called on Friday on the United States to respect regulations stipulated by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) regarding all athletes.
"Respect for the supreme authority of WADA," the IOC chief stated speaking to journalists in the French capital of Paris. "And we have been calling on everybody to respect this supreme authority as the IOC does."
"We have delegated our entire anti-doping system to ITA [the International Testing Agency] and CAS [the Court of Arbitration for Sport]," he continued. "ITA working under this supreme authority of WADA."
"We have full confidence in the work of WADA and have asked all the stakeholders involved in this public dispute to sit together and have a dialogue to come to a solution which ensures a fair competition and the fair treatment of all athletes of the world," Bach added.
The United States Anti-Doping Agency's (USADA) compliance with the World Anti-Doping Code is set to be reviewed this month. This will mark the first time that WADA has filed an appeal with the Independent Compliance Court. The appeal comes in connection with the situation regarding the doping samples of Chinese swimmers.
On April 21, The New York Times daily reported that 23 top Chinese swimmers had tested positive for a banned substance, the drug trimetazidine (TMZ), seven months prior to the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) later said that it never punished the Chinese athletes because it could not refute information from the China Anti-Doping Agency (CHINADA) that the athletes had been exposed to the prohibited substance inadvertently.
At that time, the CEO of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), Travis Tygart, accused the global anti-doping body and China’s anti-doping regulator of deliberately concealing the positive test results.
The Chinese side acknowledged that the swimmers had ingested the banned drug unwittingly and in tiny amounts and that this warranted no action against them, the NYT said. A probe by the Chinese antidoping regulator showed that contamination might have been the source of TMZ.
Early last month, Xinhua news agency reported citing an independent prosecutor’s report, that "The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) did not show ‘favoritism or deference, or in any way favored’ the 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for trimetazidine (TMZ) due to food contamination in 2021."
According to the Chinese news agency, "WADA held an online extraordinary Executive meeting on Tuesday [July 9] in Montreal discussing the interim report delivered by Independent Prosecutor Eric Cottier, regarding his review of WADA's handling of the China Anti-Doping Agency's (CHINADA's) no-fault contamination case involving 23 swimmers from China in 2021… In the report, Cottier concluded that WADA had been unbiased and reasonable in handling the case."