Sports Illustrated [excerpt]: With all those positive tests as a pre-Olympic backdrop, and with 11 of the original TMZ 23 #athletes on the Chinese roster for #Paris, scrutiny and suspicion were high. So were expectations, after #China hauled in 16 medals (five gold, three silver, eight bronze) at the 2023 world championships.
Through the first four days of competition here, China swam unspectacularly. ...
Then Pan did his thing.
... It was a stunning swim, both visually and contextually. To be a full body length clear of the field in an Olympic sprint final—leaving Chalmers and Popovici and five others in his wake—was unusual. The margin of victory, .92 of a second, is the largest in the #Olympics in that event since 1928.
Yep, this was a once-every-96-year beatdown.
It also was the first world record of the Olympic competition here, in what has been a notoriously slow and vexing pool. It took five days and 20 events for someone to do what normally comes often at the Olympics—and when a record finally went down, it was crushed.
...It was enough to send podcaster, former American college coach at Auburn and two-time Olympian Brett Hawke into an Instagram rant.
“I’m just going to be honest, I’m angry at that swim,” Hawke said in a video he posted after Pan’s swim. “I’ve studied this sport, I’ve studied speed, I understand it. I’m an expert in it. It’s what I do. And I'm upset right now because you don't win the 100 freestyle by a body length against that field. It’s just not humanly possible. It’s not real.”
If Pan made history fair and square, the hovering doubt is sadly unfair to him. But this is the situation his country and his sport created for him.
...It must also be noted that he was not one of the 23 Chinese #swimmers who tested positive for TMZ. According to World Aquatics’s testing numbers that it released on the eve of the Olympics, Pan has been drug tested 21 times in 2024—a very high number, in line with the increased testing of the Chinese since the April TMZ revelations—with all of them presumably negative.
But prior to exploding Wednesday night, Pan’s Olympics had been all over the map. ...
Meanwhile, other Chinese swimmers expected to play major roles were underperforming. Breastroke star Qin Haiyang, world-record holder in the 200, failed to make the final in the event. In the 100, the defending world champion finished a dismal seventh. Qin was one of the 11 members of the Chinese Olympic contingent who tested positive for TMZ.
...So there was no telling what to expect when Pan went to the starting blocks Wednesday night. A gold medal certainly seemed possible—but a massive world record came as a shock.
And it came with a cloud of doubt. This is what China has earned for itself, with WADA and World Aquatics complicit in that. It would be nice to believe in Pan Zhanle, but also naive.
#news #sports
