FINA vice president and Australian Olympian Matt Dunn said that the organization could challenge the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s decision not to strip Sun Yang of recent medals in light of his eight-year ban from the sport for an anti-doping rules violation.
In its statement released after the decision, FINA noted that it “noted CAS’s provisions with regard to the modification of competition results.” Since then, a number of international swimmers – perhaps most prominently, South African Chad le Clos – have questioned the decision not to vacate Sun’s results.
Additionally, the Australian Swimming Coaches and Teachers Association released a statement calling for the removal of his medals from the 2019 FINA World Championships. The organization is primarily concerned for Mack Horton
“The Australian Swimming Coaches and Teachers Association (ASCTA) had today accused banned Chinese drug cheat Sun Yang and Swimming’s world governing body FINA of ‘stealing the dreams’ of swimmers and coaches worldwide for not already stripping Sun of his 2019 World Championships gold medals,” the statement said.
“FINA must reconsider the decision handed down by WADA not to reverse Sun’s World Championships results and forget about the ‘legal loop hole’ they are talking about and do what is right by athletes.” Note that the decision was made by CAS and not WADA, as the statement suggests.
Full statement. Whack indeed. https://t.co/sTjuW5ojUK pic.twitter.com/yUzhMNOiFc
— Alex Hart (@alexhart7) March 2, 2020
Dunn said he “believed removing Sun’s world championship medals would be considered by FINA,” but not until after Sun’s appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal is complete.
“I think the option [of stripping Sun of his medals] will be open. We supported the judgment of the FINA doping panel, and consequently we support the decision of the CAS. Really we wean to ensure the WADA code is enforced as best we can in order to ensure a drug-free playing field for clean athletes,” Dunn told The Sydney Morning Herald.
“From FINA’s perspective the importance is to have a drug-free sport. As an ex-member of the WADA athlete committee I’m very committed to that. We have to ensure our procedures are as robust as possible to ensure our sport is clean and all athletes are protected.”
Shortly after last week’s landmark decision, Sun said he would ‘definitely’ appeal the outcome to the Swiss Federal Tribunal, and his lawyer claimed that CAS “listened to all lies” in making its decision.
They can’t come up with evidence.They did this for Horton because without sun he will win Tokyo Olympic games:)
People need to lay off Sun. He hasn’t been caught using drugs so why strip medals
The Dunn statement is nothing more than window dressing. Grandfather will not allow this treatment to occur. Get rid of the Bureau and start again. The gravy train has been too good for most of them and Dunn is no more than a feather duster in the scheme of things. Good on the coaches for rightly pointing out the lack of spine from Swimming Australia as well.
Omg… the guy is already crucified, at least let him “die” in piece…
Strip em. Cheater
Or you know, seeing as the incident in question took place 8 months before the last world championships, you could’ve just not let him compete in the first place…
Because FINA was too scared of Winnie the Pooh
Can get your medals taken away if you smash them with a hammer
he isn’t serving his ban for drug doping it is for a procedural issue, everyone needs to stop making the false accusation that he was using drugs which helped him swim there is no proof of that and that is not why he is banned currently
It’s possible that sun did use drugs but
A: if he did it probably didn’t help much(at most 1%) drugs only help u recover from training faster(technique and training is why he won)
B: a good portion of swim swammers believe sun is the only drug user in the sport so he must be bashed
C: in reality many other top level swimmers use drugs but haven’t been caught (same as every other sport)
To respond to your first point, claiming that drugs only help you recover from training, and then going on to state that training is why he won(along with technique), if drugs help you recover from training, then they allow you to train at a higher level for longer amounts of time, then emphatically YES, drugs helped him a ton. That’s primarily the reason that most take the PEDs, to be able to train at a higher level for longer amounts of time since they can recover faster from said training. It’s a significant advantage. Dude’s a cheat, and deserves this ban and should also have his results voided.
Sun was using banned drugs in his first ban in 2014, which Fina didn’t announce and was only for 3 months, allowing Sun Yang to swim in 2014 Asian Games
In 2014 he was using drugs that had only recently been banned
For the record, he did test positive in 2014.