Congress responds to IOC threat by introducing anti-doping bill: ‘We will not be silenced’

PARIS — United States Senators and Congressmen on Tuesday announced a bipartisan effort to buck the International Olympic Committee and strengthen the U.S. government’s ability to police doping in international sport.

The lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans from both chambers and three separate congressional committees or subcommittees — said on a videoconference call that they would introduce “legislation to bring accountability and transparency to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).”

The effort comes less than a week after the IOC dropped a bombshell in Salt Lake City’s 2034 Olympic host contract, essentially an attempt to scare off any U.S. authorities who might want to intervene in anti-doping affairs. A last-minute amendment allows the IOC to “terminate” the contract“ in cases where the supreme authority of the World Anti-Doping Agency in the fight against doping is not fully respected, or if the application of the world anti-doping code is hindered or undermined,” IOC vice president John Coates said.

U.S. lawmakers interpreted the amendment as an attempt “to strong-arm the U.S. into dropping an FBI investigation into the [Chinese swimming] scandal,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said.

“Our message is simple,” Blackburn continued. “We will not be silenced for trying to promote fair play.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) reiterated: “We will not cave into efforts to try to threaten or intimidate the United States and the Salt Lake City Games.”

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) said he felt like the “threat was somehow written in Beijing.”

Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) added: “This brazen attempt by the IOC and WADA to force Utah to interfere in an investigation would win the gold medal in blackmail.”

The bill they collectively proposed, the “Restoring Confidence in the World Anti-Doping Agency Act,” would empower the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy to withhold the federal government’s annual financial contribution to WADA.

Governments from around the world supply half of WADA’s funding. The U.S., with a payment of $3.6 million in 2024, is the largest donor. But many in the U.S. are unhappy with how WADA is run. Citing that displeasure, Moolenaar said the bill would give the ONDCP the “authority to ensure WADA maintains proper conflict of interest policies and maintains strict standards to counter state-sponsored doping efforts.”

The debate over U.S. involvement in anti-doping enforcement

Several IOC members and WADA president Witold Banka have strongly rebuked U.S. authorities, from the federal government to Travis Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), for their statements and interventions in the months since a 2021 case involving 23 Chinese swimmers burst into public view in April.

Last week here in Paris, they specifically took aim at the Rodchenkov Act, a 2020 U.S. law that allows the Department of Justice to prosecute international doping conspiracies — and that has apparently left some international sports officials afraid of entering the U.S., lest they get ensnared by an FBI investigation.

The Rodchenkov Act’s “extraterritorial clause,” which gives the U.S. DOJ power to probe non-U.S. countries and athletes, is an “obvious attempt to disharmonize the [anti-doping] system, it’s definitely not in accordance with the [world anti-doping] code,” Banka argued at a news conference.

He later added: “It’s highly incorrect that one country try to impose their jurisdiction on the anti-doping decisions of the rest of the world.”

Critics of WADA, however, argue that without Tygart, journalists and the U.S. government, the global anti-doping regulator would have nobody holding it accountable. WADA was founded by the IOC. It is partially funded and partially governed by the IOC. It “is heavily run by the sport movement,” Rob Koehler, an athlete advocate who worked at WADA from 2002-2018, told Yahoo Sports.

In theory, it is also partially run by representatives from national governments. Its executive committee and foundation board include dozens of these so-called “public authorities.” WADA’s directors and Banka, though, play dominant roles in running the organization, multiple people familiar with its inner-workings told Yahoo Sports. They never even informed the ExCo or the board about the now-controversial Chinese case.

That case — in which the Chinese Anti-Doping Agency (CHINADA) chose not to punish the swimmers, and WADA chose to accept dubious evidence of contamination rather than enforcing its own rules — has ignited a spat between USADA and WADA, and a U.S. governmental effort to police doping.

The DOJ and FBI are investigating the Chinese case. The investigation has rattled WADA and Olympic sports officials, who feel their authority is being compromised — and some of whom fear subpoenas or arrests if they were to travel to the U.S. for the Games or other competitions. That, it seems, is why they pushed the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) and Salt Lake bid leaders to agree to the contractual amendment. The American officials said last week that all parties planned to talk through their differences after the 2024 Paris Olympics.

“We’ll work very closely with the Department of Justice, we’ll work with the Senate, we’ll work with the Biden administration and whatever the next administration is, so that we can get a comfort level in what we’re going to do to work together,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said at a news conference last week here in Paris.

The newly proposed legislation, on the surface, appears to be a unilateral step in the opposite direction, a congressional attempt to take matters into U.S. hands.

On the contrary, Van Hollen argued, it will “actually encourage … collaboration.” He said it could be “a mechanism and incentive to getting the kind of transparent system that we want, with the accountability that we want.”

When pressed on the concerns that political involvement in anti-doping could lead to “anarchy” in the global system, Van Hollen said: “We’ve become involved because WADA failed to do its job. They failed to comply with their own mandate, which is to ensure the integrity of sport.”

A new report of Chinese positive tests

The announcement came as fresh scrutiny of Chinese swimming emerged in Paris. The New York Times reported Tuesday that two positive tests in 2022 had been attributed to food contamination, and the swimmers had been cleared after provisional suspensions.

Food contamination is a known and legitimate issue that has affected dozens of athletes across dozens of sports and countries, including the U.S. The issue here, however, was that CHINADA once again did not publicly disclose the tests; and once again cleared the swimmers without direct proof beyond reasonable doubt that the drug in question — this time a steroid, metandienone — had entered their systems accidentally.

WADA said in a statement that, “off the back of these cases, WADA wanted to assess the circumstances, scale and risk of meat contamination with metandienone in China and other countries. As a result, WADA initiated an investigation in early 2024.” That investigation, it said, is ongoing.

WADA’s statement also hinted at its broader — and arguably diversionary — stance that the uproar over Chinese athletes is tied to the chilly relationship between the U.S. and China.

“The politicization of Chinese swimming 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,” the statement concluded. “As we have seen over recent months, WADA has been unfairly caught in the middle of geopolitical tensions between superpowers.”