China Suggests Australian Beef to Blame for Positive Doping Tests in 2022

Chinese authorities are apparently pointing the finger at Australian beef as the potential source of contamination in the case of two swimmers — Tang Muhan and He Junyi — who tested positive for trace amounts of the banned steroid metandienone back in October of 2022.

Tang and He were provisionally suspended by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) before being cleared late last year, with China claiming they unwittingly ingested the substance while eating hamburgers at a fast food restaurant in Beijing. WADA did not challenge China’s assertion that contaminated meat was the source of the positive tests, noting that the two swimmers registered negative tests in the days before and after their positives.

Meat and Livestock Australia fired back with a statement on Wednesday saying that metandienone “is not used in any capacity in Australian beef production or in any veterinary medicine.” Anti-doping authorities and experts told the New York Times that they could not think of another case where a positive test for metandienone was confirmed to have been caused by food contamination.

“I read the report this morning,” said women’s 1500 freestyle gold medalist Katie Ledecky, who previously shared her faith in the Olympic anti-doping system is at an “all-time low.” “I think I’ve made my thoughts pretty clear. It’s disappointing.”

WADA has now accepted food contamination findings for at least three Chinese doping cases in recent years. Tang was not one of the 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a banned substance seven months before the Tokyo Olympics, but He was. Three of those swimmers — Wang Shun, Yang Junxuan, and Qin Haiyang — also reportedly tested positive for low levels of clenbuterol in 2016 and 2017. Tang is gearing up to defend her Olympic title in the women’s 4×200 free relay on Thursday along with Yang. He is not competing at the Paris Olympics this summer.

WADA also released a statement on Tuesday, blaming geopolitical tensions for the latest leak. The global anti-doping authority added that it opened an investigation “to assess the circumstances, scale, and risk of meat contamination with metandienone in China and other countries” earlier this year.

“The politicization of anti-doping continues with this latest attempt by the media in the United States to imply wrongdoing on the part of WADA and the broader anti-doping community,” WADA said in a statement on Tuesday. “As we have seen over recent months, WADA has been unfairly caught in the middle of geopolitical tensions between superpowers but has no mandate to participate in that.”