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Sun Yang, a three-time Olympic champion and one of China’s best-known athletes, had an eight-year ban from swimming reduced to four years on Tuesday.
The ruling means Sun, 29, will miss the Olympics this summer, but the timing of the penalty was structured in a way that would allow him to compete in the Paris Olympics within three years.
Sun’s case was heard by a panel of judges at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland in May after his previous suspension, which was considered by a different panel of arbitrators, was overturned in December.
The new penalty against Sun prevents him from competing for 51 months – four years plus an additional three months that reflects a previous doping violation in 2014. But the suspension was so retroactive that it took effect in February 2020; This means that it will end in May 2024, just weeks before the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
Sun was initially banned for eight years for refusing to provide blood and urine samples to those responsible for doping, but the Swiss Federal Court overturned his suspension in December. The court’s decision came after Sun’s lawyers presented evidence that the head of the three-member panel that issued Sun’s comment in February 2020, made racist comments about China on social media.
The new ruling follows a pattern that has developed in recent years in which the ICC, as the court is known, partially upholds previously administered sanctions after appeal. The court has in recent years reduced sanctions imposed on Russia for its state-sponsored doping programme; These decisions will allow the athletes to compete largely without a hitch in Tokyo this summer.
Sun, a six-time Olympic medalist and the first Chinese man to win a gold medal in swimming at the Games, fought a multi-year battle with the World Anti-Doping Agency to maintain his eligibility for international competition.
WADA filed a complaint against Sun with CAS in 2019 after the international swimming governing body refused to sanction him for refusing to cooperate with three anti-doping officials who traveled to his home in China to collect blood and urine samples in September 2018.
The court, after a November 2019 hearing marred by translation problems, agreed with the DEA’s primary claim that Sun had violated rules regarding tampering or obstruction of doping proceedings.
The new ruling to reduce the sentence came after a second hearing, unlike the first, which was closed to the media and the public.
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