Swimming scandals are particularly startling. The pool feels the most controlled and sterile of all Olympic sports, with timers, split-second finishes nearly surgical lanes. It’s essentially a sport of pure physics. Therefore, it tends to land harder than most when the biggest names in the sport cross moral boundaries. Contrary to popular belief, the water is not as good at hiding objects.
In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, Ryan Lochte discovered that the hard way. After a night of festivities, the 12-time Olympic medallist returned with a story that swiftly got out of hand: armed attackers, gunpoint robbery heroic defiance. As Brazilian authorities quickly showed, it was vivid, chaotic mostly made up. Security footage revealed a different story.
In the end, Lochte acknowledged that he had “overexaggerated” a word that does a lot of diplomatic heavy lifting when you’ve caused an international incident during someone else’s Olympic Games. He was suspended from competition for ten months. Every new detail made the situation worse rather than better the fallout was immediate and somewhat depressing.
Many onlookers at the time were more impressed by the doubling down than by the lie. Lochte dramatized the story, added details recounted it on television. Seeing someone dig a hole and persevere has a certain psychological allure. It’s possible that, at first, he honestly believed his own exhilarating account of what had happened. Around the second press interview, “believed it” and “it was true” ceased to be synonymous.
What surfaced about Chinese swimmers prior to the Tokyo Games is perhaps less resolved and more concerning. Twenty-three athletes tested positive for the prohibited heart drug trimetazidine months prior to competition, including members of the relay team that defeated the United States. The World Anti-Doping Agency allowed them to compete after accepting an explanation about tainted meat at a hotel.
In testimony before a U.S. House subcommittee, Michael Phelps described it as precisely what it appeared to be: an organization unable or unwilling to consistently enforce its own rules. “We may never know the truth and that may haunt many of us for years” is how Allison Schmitt, who competed against that Chinese relay team, put it more subtly. It’s difficult to deal with the persistent suspicion that the race you ran fairly may not have been fair at all, rather than outright rage.
Pulling back further darkens the picture of systemic doping. At least two Olympic cycles were clouded by Russia’s state-sponsored program, which was revealed by whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov in 2016. While the full ramifications of what had occurred were still being debated in committee rooms and courts, athletes competed under the acronyms OAR and later ROC.
On the other hand, the doping program in East Germany has never been properly considered. For what officials referred to as “international prestige through sports”, young female athletes received injections of male hormones and steroids. Many of those athletes are still dealing with the physical fallout decades later. In the tabloid sense, that is not a scandal. It’s a heavier thing.
The question of who the testing and enforcement systems genuinely protect permeates everything. It’s difficult to disagree with Phelps’ assertion that athletes can no longer blindly trust WADA after witnessing this develop over several Games.
Evidence that the process isn’t being applied consistently has strained the notion that clean athletes just need to train harder and have faith in the process. Although the pool appears to be clear, the water has been murky for a while.
This does not imply that the sport is unredeemable. It indicates that humans are capable of both extraordinary successes and extraordinary failures in roughly equal measure. The records are still in existence. The races continue to take place. It’s getting harder and harder to watch a relay final without a tiny, silent question starting to form in the back of your mind. It may be the longest-lasting harm these scandals have caused, now that I think about it.