Chinese swimmers shrug off pre-Olympic challenges

Confident in their innocence and free from any wrongdoing, Chinese swimmers have shrugged off distractions outside the pool to focus fully on pursuing their Olympic ambitions in Paris.

Despite a rigorous pre-Games testing program apparently disrupting their daily routines, Chinese swimmers performed impressively on Day 1 of the Paris Olympics. Butterfly star Zhang Yufei and breaststroke specialist Qin Haiyang both sailed smoothly into their respective finals.

In the swimming program's first relay final session, the Chinese women's 4x100m freestyle team pushed winner Australia and runner-up United States to the limit. The quartet of Yang Junxuan, Cheng Yujie, Zhang Yufei, and Wu Qingfeng clocked a new Asian record time of 3 minutes and 30.30 seconds to win a bronze medal at Paris La Defense Arena on Saturday night.

In the night session's first individual final, young men's freestyler Fei Liwei touched in with a personal best time of 3:44.24 to finish sixth in the 400m final, a result Fei considered a great confidence boost for his career.

"To represent my country for the first time at the Olympics and to be able to compete fiercely against the world's best feels so honored and exciting," said Fei, a 21-year-old who is making his Olympic debut in Paris.

"I focus more on the process though coming up against the top swimmers in the world, but I also feel quite satisfied with my result today."

Asked whether the high-frequency doping tests imposed by the International Testing Agency had affected his preparation, Fei said the whole team has been very cooperative with the world anti-doping authorities' scrutiny, and expressed strong confidence in racing fairly and with integrity.

"I don't really care too much about others' opinions, or whatever prejudices they might have, because we knew what we've been through and how we made the progress we had.

"We knew we are clean athletes who just worked extremely hard and overcame challenges under scientific guidelines from our coaches to push for breakthroughs. And that's enough for us to focus on our own," said Fei.

Prior to the Paris Games, some Western media organizations, including the New York Times and German television network ARD, published a series of sensationalized reports about a proven food contamination incident from early 2021. The incident involved 23 Chinese swimmers whose doping tests returned positive results for "low-concentration" trimetazidine, a banned substance, during a national championship.

Although several probes and reviews by the World Anti-Doping Agency and World Aquatics, swimming's international governing body, had all supported the contamination theory and cleared the involved athletes of any violations, unfair judgments and groundless accusations by media and organizations, such as the United States Anti-Doping Agency, have unnecessarily put Chinese athletes in a difficult position in Paris.

Qin, a three-time world champion in breaststroke, said he approached the first day of the Games as normally as ever.

"I feel quite OK. I've made no big deal (regarding the distractions). Everything just feels as usual as ever. Nobody swam particularly well, or bad, today. I think I will have a legitimate chance to win tomorrow," Qin said, after clocking 58.93 in semifinals to advance into Sunday's final.

Zhang, the reigning women's 200m butterfly Olympic champion, finished third in 56.15 in the semifinals of the 100m to make it to the sprint event's final, where she is expected to face stiff challenges from current world record holder Gretchen Walsh and Torri Huske, both from the US.