At the recently completed Swimming World Champs in Gwangju, South Korea, Australian Mack Horton refused to share the podium with gold medallist Sun Yang after the 400m freestyle final.

Yang, a Chinese athlete, was competing despite the fact that the Court of Arbitration for Sport is preparing to hear a doping case against him in September.

Horton wasn’t alone, because British swimmer Duncan Scott also refused to share a podium with Yang, which led to this ugly showdown.

Whilst you can’t fault Horton or Scott for their decision, because theirs is a stance shared by many athletes, things have since become rather awkward for Horton, and Swimming Australia in particular.

That’s because one of their Olympic hopefuls, 20-year-old Shayna Jack, has announced that she tested positive for anabolic agent Ligandrol – which is popular with bodybuilders – in late June, with a follow-up sample confirming the banned substance.

Swimming Australia is now being accused of massive hypocrisy, particularly in China, where the country has been called a “second-class citizen of the West” and guilty of “white supremacy”.

In addition, Horton has been on the end of widespread abuse online by trolls, including a number of death threats.

Below from the BBC:

…Jack’s admission has poured petrol on the tinderbox. She has been bombarded with taunts in both Chinese and English that have castigated Australia as a “nation of cheats”. Some posts features emojis of pills.

“This country of Australia is as rubbish as your swimmers. You’re doing drugs and losing face,” wrote one commenter.

Jack [above] has reportedly hunkered down at home in Brisbane with her family as she protests her innocence and vows to clear her name. She has insisted she had no idea how the banned substance got into her system, although it has been suggested she could have taken contaminated supplements.

After an initial statement on Instagram, Jack has issued what she calls ‘the truth and nothing but the truth’ in an online PDF, which you can read here,

Australia has always boasted about playing hard but fair, although those claims took a massive knock after the cricket’s SandpaperGate.

Now the wheels look to be coming off:

Swimming Australia, the governing body, did know about Jack’s shock test result when Horton refused to share the podium with his Chinese rival. Its chief executive, Leigh Russell, said his protest was “difficult” to watch knowing that the doping scandal would soon erupt.

“I certainly was watching Mack, distressed about what would befall both Shayna and Mack in the coming days and week,” she said.

So was Horton let down by swimming bosses? The former head of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority believes that Swimming Australia should have reacted to Jack’s positive test far sooner.

“By covering up and not telling the truth, it makes the story bigger and worse,” Richard Ings told the ABC.

Yeah, they let one of their swimmers act all high and mighty, whilst knowing that would shortly result in a massive backlash.

You can’t fault Horton, but you can certainly fault Swimming Australia.

In amongst all of the scrutiny, further allegations of a second cover-up have emerged.

How about this from former Aussie Paralympic swimmer Ashleigh Cockburn (below), via NewsAU:

Members of the Australian Para swim team are allegedly misrepresenting their disabilities in order to compete against athletes who are more severely impaired.

Ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, members of the team are preparing for classification testing which assesses their disabilities and allows them to be categorised with athletes of a similar standing.

Often described as a murky process impacted by the pressure of tying funding to medal tallies, the alleged cheating and lies have prompted several athletes to speak out.

As a former member of the team, I witnessed intentional misrepresentation become not only accepted but expected. Throughout my career, I heard athletes casually mention how they had been thrown in the snow prior to classification so their muscles and joints were far stiffer than usual, or how they’d been instructed by someone higher up to “throw on a limp” during testing.

Others bound their limbs to restrict flexibility, strength and fine motor skills or pushed themselves to physical exhaustion just before the test in order to reduce stamina and power.

There were also athletes who had previously competed as able-bodied who borrowed a disability for classification.

Holy. Shit.

Cockburn said the most common classification to try and cheat was cerebral palsy, where some coaches would allegedly train their athletes to “move in a way that mimics the symptoms of the condition”.

This included clenching a fist while swimming, or kicking with just a single leg.

Other former athletes supported Cockburn’s claims:

A former swimmer, who quit after becoming “fed-up with the scene”, described the culture within the sport as “suffocating”. “You can’t escape. You feel helpless,” he said.

A third athlete said para sport was an illusion. “(It makes out to be an) amazing inspiration, only (you) find yourself trapped within a cage of lies,” she said.

Wow, Australia. That’s quite something.

You can read the rest of Cockburn’s article here.

There’s no denying that Australia’s sporting success on the world stage, given their population, is an incredible feat.

Stories like these, though, when coupled with other recent sporting scandals, really don’t paint a pretty picture.

[sources:bbc&newsau]