Antidoping Agency Acknowledges Concern Over Use of Tainted Food as Excuse

The global antidoping regulator disclosed on Tuesday that it is investigating why athletes in China and other countries who are testing positive for banned drugs are escaping discipline through claims that they have unwittingly ingested the performance-enhancing substances through food.

The statement from the World Anti-Doping Agency came after The New York Times reported earlier on Tuesday on a previously undisclosed case in which two elite Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a powerful steroid in 2022 were cleared late last year after their country’s antidoping authority blamed contaminated hamburgers.

It was the third incident in recent years in which China blamed food contamination for positive tests among members of its national swimming team.

In its statement on Tuesday, the World Anti-Doping Agency, known as WADA, revealed that at the same time it was looking into how the two swimmers had tested positive, it was also examining the previously undisclosed cases of two other Chinese athletes in different sports — shooting and BMX bike riding — who tested positive in early 2023 for trace amounts of the same banned drug, metandienone.

China’s antidoping regulator conducted tests that discovered metandienone in dozens of meat samples in the country, WADA said, and ultimately cleared the two other athletes as well as the two swimmers of doping.

After the Chinese investigation, WADA said, it began its own inquiry early this year “to assess the circumstances, scale and risk of meat contamination with metandienone in China and other countries.”