Face of Nation : As 20-year-old Australian swimmer Shayna Jack awaits her fate after a marathon Friday meeting with ASADA over her positive doping test, former WADA chief Dick Pound hammered Australian swimming. And he is 100 per cent right to do so.
Pound, who served WADA for eight years as president, unloaded on Aussie swimming for what he seemed to indicate was its hypocritical stance on Chinese swimmers, specifically 200m and 400m freestyle world champ Sun Yang.
“There has been a rather strange distinction between Australia’s reaction to Sun Yang and to your own swimmer,” Pound, a former Canadian swimming champion who also served as vice-president of the International Olympic Committee, told Nine Media. “Australia should make it clear that they are as upset about one of their swimmers being caught for doping as they would be if the swimmer was Chinese.
“Australia has always been pretty firm about its opposition to doping but if the sauce is good for the goose it has to be good for the gander. “If you are going to be holier-than-thou you should come to the discussion with clean hands.”
As I alluded to earlier Pound is not wrong — Australian sport has always prided itself on being clean, swimming especially. Our list of champions in the pool is long but even many of those have a dark past and Jack’s doping ban is just the latest lowlight.
The record in the pool is now as tarnished as that out of it which includes assault charges, apartment rampages, homophobic tweets and domestic violence.
Before Jack, Thomas Fraser-Holmes was given a year-long ban after missing three drug tests in 2017. He may not have doped but the technical breach is still a drug-related ban. That followed Kylie Palmer testing positive to masking agent furosemide in 2013 before a doping case in 2015 found the drug was in her system. Only a reprimand was issued in a bizarre case.
The swim team was also in the drugs limelight in the mid-90s when much-loved breaststroker Samantha Riley went to the Atlanta Olympics under a drugs cloud. Riley was exonerated after her coach Scott Volkers admitted to giving her a headache tablet which contained the banned substance in a near-escape.
But it’s not just in the pool the problems have come. Australian swimming is far from squeaky clean and despite an effort to clean things up when a review followed the London Olympics the stench of bad behaviour fills the air and has for some years. Australians love to take pot shots at other sports stars (think of a couple of our current male tennis players as an example) but perhaps it is swimming that needs to clean up its act.
