U.S. Swimming Stars Assail Antidoping Agency Ahead of Olympics

Two of America’s most decorated Olympic swimmers will ask Congress on Tuesday to hold the global antidoping agency accountable for failing to properly police allegations of cheating by elite Chinese athletes.

In testimony prepared for delivery on Tuesday night to a House subcommittee, Michael Phelps, the 23-time Olympic gold medalist, and Allison Schmitt, a four-time Olympic gold medalist, urged Congress to push for reforms of the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA. They said the uncertainty about whether Chinese swimmers have been using banned substances is deeply unfair to competitors heading into the Summer Games next month in Paris.

The hearing comes two months after The New York Times reported that the Chinese antidoping authorities and WADA had declined to discipline 23 elite Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a banned drug in early 2021, paving their way to compete at the Games held in Tokyo that summer.

Chinese authorities said the positive tests were the result of unwitting contamination of the swimmers and involved tiny amounts of the banned substance, a finding that WADA accepted but that many antidoping experts have questioned.

Schmitt was a member of the U.S. 4x200-meter freestyle relay team that finished second to China at the Tokyo Olympics, one of the five events in which Chinese swimmers who had tested positive for the banned substance months earlier won medals, including three golds.

“We raced hard,” Schmitt wrote of the American team in testimony provided to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. “We trained hard. We followed every protocol. We respected their performance and accepted our defeat.”