Sun Yang gets shorter ban, still out of Tokyo Olympics
Chinese swimmer Sun Yang has been banned four years and three months in a retrial over a 2018 drug-testing case and will miss the Tokyo Olympics. The ban was backdated to Feb. 28, 2020, so he is eligible for the 2024 Paris Games.
Sun, a six-time Olympic medalist and 11-time world champion, was suspended for eight years in February 2020, but in December a Swiss court lifted the ban and ordered the case back to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) for a second time, but with a different chairman of the judges.
The Swiss court ruling appeared to have swung on an objection by Sun’s lawyers to the chairman of the three-judge panel, former Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini.
Federal judges ruled the guilty verdict unsafe because Frattini showed anti-Chinese bias in social media comments.
In a September 2018 clash with drug testers, a security guard from Sun’s entourage destroyed a container with a vial of the swimmer’s blood sample with a hammer. Sun said the testers didn’t have proper identification.
In announcing the February 2020 ban, a court panel unanimously determined that the personnel in charge of the doping control complied with all applicable requirements.
Sun “failed to establish that he had a compelling justification to destroy his sample collection containers and forego the doping control when, in his opinion, the collection protocol was not in compliance,” according to a 2020 press release.
According to Tuesday’s release, the new CAS panel said that Sun “acted recklessly in particular when he refused to allow the blood samples to leave.”