Do you think the Chinese Olympic gold medal swimmer Ye Shiwen is a drugs cheat?

One of the world’s most senior swimming coaches has raised serious doubts about the validity of the “unbelievable” performance of Ye Shiwen, the 16-year-old Chinese swimmer.
John Leonard, the executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, yesterday compared Ye’s winning performance in the women’s 400m individual medley to Irish swimmer Michelle Smith, who won gold in the same event at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics but was banned from swimming for four years in 1998 for tampering with a urine sample. Smith, now De Bruin, always denied using performance enhancing drugs.

Ye sent shock waves through her sport on Saturday when she set the first swimming world record of these Olympics, and in doing so swam the final 50m freestyle faster than American swimmer Ryan Lochte managed in his final leg when he won the same race in the men’s event.

“We want to be very careful about calling it doping,” Leonard said.

“The one thing I will say is that history in our sport will tell you that every time we see something, and I will put quotation marks around this, 'unbelievable’, history shows us that it turns out later on there was doping involved. That last 100m was reminiscent of some old East German swimmers, for people who have been around a while. It was reminiscent of 400m individual medley by a young Irish woman in Atlanta.

“Any time someone has looked like superwoman in the history of our sport they have later been found guilty of doping”. Ye was more than seven seconds faster in the 400m individual medley than she had been in the equivalent race of the World Championships last year. While Leonard accepted that such improvement was feasible, he described the final 100m as “impossible”. He added: “To swim three other splits at the rate that she did, which was quite ordinary for elite competition, and then unleash a historic anomaly, it is just not right. I have heard commentators saying 'well she is 16, and at that age amazing things happen’. Well yes, but not that amazing, I am sorry.”