BEIJING  (Reuters) -  The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) president Witold Banka criticized the United States for politicizing anti-doping and called it hypocritical and double standard in a statement published on WADA’s official website.
The United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing titled “Examining Anti-Doping Measures in Advance of the 2024 Olympics,” which disguised under its title a focus on a contamination case from 2021 involving 23 Chinese swimmers.
“The hearing sought to further politicize a relatively straightforward case of mass contamination that has been turned into a scandal by a small number of individuals, mainly in the United States,” Banka said in the statement.
“WADA’s job as the global regulator for clean sport is to strive to ensure that athletes of the world enjoy the same protections, rights and responsibilities whether they are from Boston or Beijing. When we review cases, we must always think about what is fair to those athletes, whatever their sport and whatever their nationality.”
The world anti-doping chief quoted in the statement American politician Adlai E. Stevenson’s saying “A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation” when addressing the talks in the hearing, led by Travis Tygart of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), who claimed other countries and WADA were not playing by the rules when numbers showed themselves are far from fulfilling their due responsibilities in anti-doping.
“To this day, 90 percent of athletes in the U.S. do not enjoy the protections provided by the World Anti-Doping Code (Code). That is because the main professional leagues and college associations refuse to be brought in under the system overseen there by the USADA.
“Even the remaining 10 percent of athletes in the U.S. are not receiving the sort of support they deserve, a reality illustrated by the fact that 31 percent of American athletes under the Code were not sufficiently tested in the 12 month-period prior to the Tokyo Games.