The timing could have been more careful. Less than 60 days before the opening of the Paris 2024 Games (D – 58), and therefore the first swimming events, while the news is struggling to chase away the doping affair involving 23 Chinese swimmers, a name is making its return to the pools. Sun Yang, the most famous swimmer produced by China, three-time Olympic champion and eleven-time world champion, can put on glasses and a swim cap. He served his suspension for doping on Monday May 27.
Sidelined from the pools for more than four years, the immense Chinese can get back into the water. At 32 years old. Too late to hope to experience the Paris 2024 Games from the inside, the Chinese Olympic selections having already taken place. But by his own admission, his thirty-year-old status and the four years away from competitions will not prevent him from breathing new life into his sporting career.
«I hope to be able to find a competition fairly quickly and get on the starting block, rediscover the atmosphere of the swimming pools that I knew, rediscover the sensations that I knew, said Sun Yang in a video interview published Tuesday, May 28 on the Chinese website The Paper. I am quite proud of the results and honors obtained throughout my career. But for now, I just hope I can bravely stand on the plot. "
Initially suspended for eight years in 2020, after an anti-doping rule violation in 2018, the Chinese saw his sanction reduced to four years and three months after a high-profile appeal lodged with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). An eternity, for a top swimmer. But Sun Yang explains it in the video: his crossing of the tunnel was long, very lonely and depressing. But he never stopped swimming and thinking about his return to the pools.
«I always said I'd never give up, he says. At the beginning of my suspension, I had very dark thoughts. But my parents always supported me. They were afraid I was going crazy because at the time I was swimming alone in the pool every day. They weren't the only ones who thought I was crazy. A lot of people wondered why I didn't move on. »
Barring an unlikely – and very unwelcome – scenario, Sun Yang should not be able to swim for China again in an international competition. According to the regulations in force in the country, an athlete suspended for doping for more than one year cannot rejoin a national team.
Sanctioned for the first time for three months in 2014, for having taken a banned substance supposed to treat an alleged heart problem, then dismissed for four years and three months, Sun Yang has accumulated bad points. And his return comes at a time when Chinese swimming has been singled out since the revelation by the German channel ARD of mass doping among its athletes, presented as food contamination. Little chance, therefore, of seeing him again outside China. But his return to the pools, even in a regional competition, promises to be an event.
