{"id":397963,"date":"2019-10-13T06:59:12","date_gmt":"2019-10-13T13:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/?p=397963"},"modified":"2019-10-13T06:59:12","modified_gmt":"2019-10-13T13:59:12","slug":"sun-yangs-court-of-arbitration-hearing-to-be-heard-november-15-says-chinese-lawyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/sun-yangs-court-of-arbitration-hearing-to-be-heard-november-15-says-chinese-lawyer\/","title":{"rendered":"Sun Yang’s Court of Arbitration Hearing To Be Heard November 15, Says Chinese Lawyer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sun Yang CAS Anti-Doping Hearing<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Sun Yang’s Court of Arbitration (CAS)<\/strong> hearing<\/strong> will be held in Lausanne on November 15, the swimmer’s Chinese lawyer Zhang Qihuai<\/strong> has announced.<\/p>\n

CAS<\/strong> has yet to add the hearing date to its published list of official hearings, its last statement confirming that a hearing was unlikely before the end of October given that all parties had not yet agreed to a timetable of events.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0hearing, requested by the World Anti-Doping Agency<\/strong> (WADA) is into a FINA Doping Panel<\/strong> decision to impose no penalty on\u00a0Sun Yang<\/strong>, the 2012 Olympic 400 and 1500m freestyle champion for China who in 2014 was served a doping penalty, after an acrimonious encounter with anti-doping testers in September 2018.<\/p>\n

Sun Yang was issued with a series of harsh rebukes, including a warning that he had put his entire career at risk. However, the Doping Panel said the case hung on the interpretation of whether the word “documentation” was singular or plural<\/a>. FINA lawyers suggested that it was plural when it came to what identification and qualification papers needed to be submitted by anti-doping agents on an out-of-competition test visit.<\/p>\n

In English language, the word documentation can be interpreted as singular or plural, while WADA is expected to argue that the paperwork submitted by agents from the IDTM anti-doping testing agency working on behalf of FINA on the evening in question last year \u00a0was adequate.<\/p>\n

That view is at least in part backed up by the FINA Doping Panel itself when<\/p>\n

The Sun Yang CAS hearing will be the first of its kind to be held in public since the Michelle Smith<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0appeal of 1998. The Irish swimmer lost her appeal, her suspension for tampering with a sample was confirmed and she retired from the sport.<\/p>\n

CAS pencilled in a tentative date for a hearing in September but the date was never confirmed nor published. All parties to the case must agree to the timing of the hearing, while one party to a case with three sides –\u00a0Sun and his lawyers and entourage; FINA;\u00a0<\/strong>and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) – <\/strong>has requested further time to prepare their case.<\/p>\n

In its last statement on the case, CAS stated:<\/p>\n

“At the parties\u2019 request, the hearing, which will likely take place in Switzerland, will be open to the public (including the media). Full details of the arrangements for those who wish to attend the hearing will be made available once the new hearing date and location have been officially confirmed. This will be the second time in the history of CAS that a hearing is held in public. The first public hearing, which took place in 1999, was also related to the sport of swimming, in the matter Michelle Smith De Bruin v. FINA.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Smith de Bruin, of Ireland, lost her case, was banned from the sport and never returned. Her triple-gold result at the Atlanta 1996 Olympic Games is not a matter of official celebration in Ireland, the national performance centre for swimming, which would have been named after Smith had she not fallen from grace, among venues void of any commemoration of her.<\/p>\n

The Sun Yang case<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\"sun-yang-200-free-final-2019-world-championships_16\"

Sun Yang – Photo Courtesy: Becca Wyant<\/p><\/div>\n

In January, the FINA Doping Panel<\/strong> issued Sun with a series of stern rebukes in the report of a hearing into an acrimonious visit to the swimmer\u2019s home by an out-of-competition testing team last September.<\/p>\n

The visit ended at around 3.15am after more than four hours of arguments between Sun and his entourage on one side and the testing team from the IDTM agency in Sweden hired by FINA on the other. By the time the arguing was done, no urine sample had been provided and the blood sample that Sun had submitted to had been smashed with a hammer, to the \u201chour\u201d of the chief testing officer, by a security guard, watched over by Sun, his mother, Ming Yang, and his doctor, Ba Zhen<\/strong>, who in 2014 and 2015 was served two suspensions by WADA for his role in Sun\u2019s positive test for a banned substance in 2014.<\/p>\n

After the Sunday Times<\/em> broke the story in January,<\/a> WADA made further inquiries into the case and decided in early March to challenge the FINA Doping Panel decision at the CAS.<\/p>\n

In January this year, the FINA Doping Panel, in its 59-page hearing report, noted that significant mistakes were made by both swimmer and entourage and the anti-doping testers. The team of Chinese testers working for IDTM, the Swedish testing agency hired by Fina, included a main officer, a blood nurse (both women), and a man there to observe Sun urinate. They may have presented inadequate documentation to prove their authority, identification and qualification for the tasks each of them were assigned.<\/p>\n

Sun objected to the identification papers and behaviour of the man there to observe him provide a urine sample. Sun’s doctor, Ba Zhen, arrived half way through four hours of argument and procedure, and objected to the qualification of the nurse present to take blood on the basis of the qualification she would have needed in certain circumstances in a Chinese hospital. IDTM and FINA argued that her qualifications were adequate for the task at hand.<\/p>\n

The biggest mistake of the testers was not to make clear to Sun Yang that they would register a \u201cfailure of comply\u201d \u2014 and then follow through by doing just that, the FINA Doping Panel concluded. Sun, meanwhile, received a caution. The panel felt \u201ccompelled to point out its very significant concerns regarding the conduct of the athlete and his entourage. Avoiding an anti-doping rule violation . . . was a close-run thing” that could have \u201cended his athletic career\u201d, the Doping Panel concluded.<\/p>\n

\"(L-R)

Mack Horton, left, keeps his distance to Sun Yang for the photo-op with bronze medallist Gabriele Detti after medals in the 400m free at world titles in Gwangju – Photo Courtesy: Patrick B. Kraemer<\/p><\/div>\n

In its “Caution to the Athlete<\/strong>” the Doping Panel noted that it “rejected many of the Athlete\u2019s contentions and positions as being unfounded and invalid.<\/p>\n

“The Athlete and his entourage were not correct regarding many aspects of the sample collection session. That should be a sobering lesson to the Athlete. The following are but examples:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n