What does Shiwen have to say about it?Leonard is the first major figure in the swimming world to voice his concerns after Ye's world record swim shocked the sport. Ye won the 400m IM gold in a world record time of 4min 28.43sec. It was her final 100m of freestyle, in which she recorded a split time of 58.68sec, that aroused Leonard's suspicion. Over the last 50m she was quicker than Ryan Lochte, who won the men's 400m IM in the second-fastest time in history.
"We want to be very careful about calling it doping," Leonard said. "The one thing I will say is that history in our sport will tell you that every time we see something, and I will put quotation marks around this, 'unbelievable', history shows us that it turns out later on there was doping involved. That last 100m was reminiscent of some old East German swimmers, for people who have been around a while. It was reminiscent of 400m individual medley by a young Irish woman in Atlanta."
Stephanie Rice, the Australian who won gold in both women's medley events in Beijing in 2008, described it as "insanely fast". Ariana Kukors, the 2009 world 200m medley champion from the USA , said it was "amazing" and "unbelievable". Ye also won the 200m medley at the World Championships in 2011, and qualified fastest for the semi-finals of that event in Monday morning's heats, in a time that was 1.61sec quicker than her nearest competitor.
Leonard said that Ye "looks like superwoman. Any time someone has looked like superwoman in the history of our sport they have later been found guilty of doping".
Ye was more than seven seconds faster in the Olympic 400m IM final than she had been in the World Championship equivalent last July. Leonard said that improvement was possible, but very hard to do. "But the final 100m was impossible. Flat out. If all her split times had been faster I don't think anybody would be calling it into question, because she is a good swimmer. But to swim three other splits at the rate that she did, which was quite ordinary for elite competition, and then unleash a historic anomaly, it is just not right."
Asked about the accusation that she was doping, Ye replied: "The Chinese team keep very firmly to the anti-doping policies, so there is absolutely no problem."
Oh. Well, okay then.
It's very difficult to detect doping these days, especially if you have a big government behind you that controls every aspect of athlete development. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that the Chinese are doping. We know a bunch of them were doping the 1990s, and some Chinese swimmers were caught again in 2009.
