Opinion | Trumpian treatment of China’s athletes hardly in keeping with Olympic spirit
- The vilification of Chinese athletes at this year’s Olympics is a reflection of how their country has been treated by the West
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.