China’s Olympic Swimming Success Deserves All of Your Doubts

PARIS — It would be nice to believe that Chinese swimmer Pan Zhanle’s scorching obliteration of the Olympic field and world record in the men’s 100-meter freestyle Wednesday night was a completely fair and honest athletic accomplishment. Nice, but also naive.

China forfeited the benefit of the doubt, as did the World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) and World Aquatics. That’s the cloud it has created and has to live under. Every great Chinese swimming feat here—and there have been few so far—will be greeted by suspicion more than celebration.

Oh well.

When one country has 23 swimmers test positive for a prohibited heart medication—trimetazidine, or TMZ—in 2021 and it goes both unannounced for three years and unpunished ever, that’s a problem. When those positive tests are written off by China, WADA and World Aquatics as accidental hotel kitchen contamination, without any credible theory on how it happened, that’s a problem. 

When The New York Times later revealed that three of those 23 swimmers also tested positive in 2016 and ’17 for the anabolic agent clenbuterol, and those tests were neither publicized nor punished, that’s a problem. And when The Times again reported on other dismissed and unpublished positive tests for two swimmers in 2022—attributed to bad beef at McDonald’s—that’s a problem. 

So much tainted food. So little credibility.

With all those positive tests as a pre-Olympic backdrop, and with 11 of the original TMZ 23 athletes on the Chinese roster for Paris, scrutiny and suspicion were high. So were expectations, after China hauled in 16 medals (five gold, three silver, eight bronze) at the 2023 world championships.

Through the first four days of competition here, China swam unspectacularly. With just two silver medals and two bronze—and several surprising disappointments—there were some tart remarks in La Défense Arena about what might have been missing from China’s pre-meet preparation.

Then Pan did his thing.

The 19-year-old didn’t just break the world record he set at the world championships in Doha in February, he destroyed it. In dropping the mark from 46.80 seconds to 46.40, Pan recorded the largest time reduction of the 100 free world record in 48 years.

After Jonty Skinner of South Africa went 49.44 in 1976, the world record had been broken another 17 times. But it was only nibbled at, dropping a tenth of a second or two at a time, until settling at 46.91 in 2009. Olympic champions Caeleb Dressel of the U.S. and Kyle Chalmers of Australia took runs at it but couldn’t beat that mark.

The last re-writing of the record book was in February by Pan himself, taking .06 off the mark set by David Popovici in 2022. Then here came Pan to take a giant bite out of it in Paris, at a time when doubt in China—and WADA, and World Aquatics—is at an all-time high. 

It was a stunning swim, both visually and contextually. To be a full body length clear of the field in an Olympic sprint final—leaving Chalmers and Popovici and five others in his wake—was unusual. The margin of victory, .92 of a second, is the largest in the Olympics in that event since 1928.

Yep, this was a once-every-96-year beatdown. 

It also was the first world record of the Olympic competition here, in what has been a notoriously slow and vexing pool. It took five days and 20 events for someone to do what normally comes often at the Olympics—and when a record finally went down, it was crushed.

It was enough to send podcaster, former American college coach at Auburn and two-time Olympian Brett Hawke into an Instagram rant. 

“I’m just going to be honest, I’m angry at that swim,” Hawke said in a video he posted after Pan’s swim. “I’ve studied this sport, I’ve studied speed, I understand it. I’m an expert in it. It’s what I do. And I’m upset right now because you don’t win the 100 freestyle by a body length against that field. It’s just not humanly possible. It’s not real.”

If Pan made history fair and square, the hovering doubt is sadly unfair to him. But this is the situation his country and his sport created for him.

He’s a precocious talent who first hit the international scene in 2021 at age 16, and has progressed from there. It must also be noted that he was not one of the 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for TMZ. According to World Aquatics’s testing numbers that it released on the eve of the Olympics, Pan has been drug tested 21 times in 2024—a very high number, in line with the increased testing of the Chinese since the April TMZ revelations—with all of them presumably negative.

But prior to exploding Wednesday night, Pan’s Olympics had been all over the map. He swam a 46.92-second lead leg on the 400 freestyle relay on the first night of competition, fastest split in the field. But he then finished 22nd in the 200 freestyle, appearing to flatly give up late in the race and missing the semifinals. His 200 split in the 800 relay was a solid 1:45.81, second-fastest of anyone on the Chinese relay that finished fourth.

Pan’s preliminary 100 freestyle was slow enough that he nearly missed the semifinals, finishing tied for 13th. He was .06 away from the humiliation of missing the top 16 in an event where he set the world record earlier this year. Then he swam markedly faster in the semis … and then came the bomb drop in the final.

Meanwhile, other Chinese swimmers expected to play major roles were underperforming. Breastroke star Qin Haiyang, world-record holder in the 200, failed to make the final in the event. In the 100, the defending world champion finished a dismal seventh. Qin was one of the 11 members of the Chinese Olympic contingent who tested positive for TMZ.

Other unexpected results kept rolling in. Backstroker Xu Jiayu, who finished second in the 100, scratched the 200 on Wednesday. Fei Liwei, a 400 freestyler of modest renown, swam a massive personal best to qualify third for the eight-man final in that event, then finished sixth.

So there was no telling what to expect when Pan went to the starting blocks Wednesday night. A gold medal certainly seemed possible—but a massive world record came as a shock.

And it came with a cloud of doubt. This is what China has earned for itself, with WADA and World Aquatics complicit in that. It would be nice to believe in Pan Zhanle, but also naive.