CHINADA ready to cooperate with WADA in regular compliance review

BEIJING -- China's Anti-Doping Agency (CHINADA) will actively cooperate with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in the coming regular compliance review and provide assistance where needed, it said here on Friday.

WADA decided to send a compliance audit team to China in order to assess the current state of its anti-doping program as part of the Agency's regular compliance monitoring program at its Executive Committee (ExCo) meeting on Thursday in Montreal.

"Previous compliance reviews of such kind also took place in 2017 through a compliance audit and in 2022 through a Code Compliance Questionnaire (CCQ), where we got professional guidance from WADA to further improve our work," it said. "CHINADA will actively cooperate with the coming audit by WADA, and provide assistance where needed."

WADA also announced after its ExCo meeting that it will invite Swiss independent prosecutor Eric Cottier to review its handling of the no-fault contamination case involving 23 swimmers from China in 2021.

CHINADA called that WADA's decision "is a clear demonstration of fairness, openness and transparency."

A total of 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for an "extremely low concentration" of trimetazidine (TMZ) at a national swimming event in 2021 after inadvertently being exposed to the substance through contamination. After WADA Science Department and external legal counsel reviewed this case thoroughly, it accepted CHINADA's conclusion that "the athletes would be held to have no fault or negligence."