In the middle of a record haul at the Tokyo Olympics, Canada’s women’s swim team had one letdown – the 4x200-metre freestyle relay.
China was allowed to do its own investigation into the mass positive. That probe determined the athletes had been exposed to TMZ in tainted food at a team hotel. How exactly so many of them ingested it, while others did not, wasn’t explained. It would also have pushed a Games that was on the edge closer to the drop. Few in Japan were super stoked about the world dropping by en masse during what would become that country’s first mass COVID wave.
You don’t need to be a Reddit obsessive to see what happened here. The Chinese swim team got caught mid-purge, and the people in charge had to prioritize their response.They picked money over fairness. But out in the real world, no one cares. Of course the Olympics is dirty. The Olympics has spent the last half century repeatedly reminding us of that.
In this specific instance, real change in the form of zero tolerance could have hobbled one Olympics and gotten the next one cancelled. Then what?