World Anti-Doping Agency officials spent 99 minutes Monday answering questions and criticism swirling around a scandal that has roiled Olympic swimming. In the end, all their scientific and legal justifications for allowing nearly two dozen positive tests to go unpunished boiled down to a single explanation: they trusted China.
Travis Tygart, the combative CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, found their answers “entirely unsatisfying.”
In a phone interview Monday night with Yahoo Sports, Tygart called the theory advanced by Chinese authorities — that a banned heart medication, trimetazidine (TMZ), contaminated food or water in a hotel kitchen and entered the bodies of 23 Chinese swimmers — “a fairy tale.