Trumpian treatment of China’s athletes hardly in keeping with Olympic spirit

If the Olympics are a proxy for geopolitics, they also typically are replete with paeans to the global spirit of sportsmanship and mutual respect. They are supposed to bring out the best in everyone – except, apparently, when the athletes in question are Chinese.

The aspersions stemmed from a report that 23 Chinese swimmers had tested positive for a banned substance just before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Notably, Pan was not among those swimmers. Moreover, Pan has said he was tested for performance-enhancing drugs before and after his record swim.

Nevertheless, after Pan swam an extremely fast final leg in the men’s 4x100-metre medley relay to take China to gold, a commentator for a US broadcaster saw fit to mention that two of the swimmers on the team had tested positive for a banned substance three years earlier, although he also clarified that Pan had not tested positive.

These occurrences echo decades-old patterns, as I know from personal experience. As an elite (although hardly Olympics-calibre) high school basketball player in 1980s, I was an oddity as an Asian-American player. Our “place” was assumed to be in chemistry labs or calculus classes. Competitors and spectators shouted, “You people should be playing ping pong.” Even my coach nicknamed me “Chinaman”.

At the Olympics, so long as China won medals in traditionally Asian-centric or obscure competitions like table tennis, badminton, diving and shooting, the West didn’t feel threatened. Attitudes seemed to change when China began making advances in events like swimming and tennis.

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Do these inflammatory tirades make a difference? They certainly don’t seem to have affected China’s