Sun Yang protests his innocence, vows to appeal 8-year ban

“I believe you!” thousands of Chinese netizens have declared

After being handed an eight-year competition ban that would effectively end his career, Olympic champion Chinese swimmer Sun Yang has vowed to appeal the ruling.

“I have always believed in my innocence. I am shocked, angry, and do not understand the ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport,” Sun wrote on Weibo after learning about the decision.

“I firmly believe in my innocence. I firmly believe that the truth will overcome the lies,” he continued.

Sun’s post has picked up nearly 3 million likes and 250,000 comments in only a few hours.

The top comments are all uniformly supportive of Sun with thousands declaring “I believe you!”

Sun’s lengthy suspension has briefly replaced the coronavirus as the hottest topic of conversation on Weibo with netizens nearly unanimous in their belief that the rest of the world has it out for China’s most successful swimmer.

“Bullshit! This is just another way of keeping China down,” declares one commenter.

“If I can speak frankly, they just can’t bear to see a ‘yellow man’ in the pool,” writes another.

“Suspended for eight years? For what? There’s no evidence he was even doping!” argues one more.

The ban comes because of a drug test at Sun’s home in September 2018 that went very awry, ending with vials of the swimmer’s blood being smashed with a hammer by a security guard.

Sun maintains that the samples were smashed because the inspectors were unable to show proper identification papers. He’s shared a video of the inspectors signing a paper to this effect and says that the vials were only destroyed after the paper was signed.

One of the inspectors has stepped forward, anonymously, to Chinese state media, describing himself as a construction worker who didn’t know the first thing about drug testing and had only come along as a favor for an old middle school classmate.

In the end, however, Cas was not persuaded by Sun’s arguments, stating:

The Athlete failed to establish that he had a compelling justification to destroy his sample collection containers and forego the doping control when, in his opinion, the collection protocol was not in compliance with the ISTI. As the Panel noted, it is one thing, having provided a blood sample, to question the accreditation of the testing personnel while keeping the intact samples in the possession of the testing authorities; it is quite another thing, after lengthy exchanges and warnings as to the consequences, to act in such a way that results in destroying the sample containers, thereby eliminating any chance of testing the sample at a later stage.

This is the second time that Sun has been suspended following a three-month sentence served in 2014 after he tested positive for a stimulant called trimetazidine.

The swimmer claimed that the stimulant had unknowingly got into his blood via a heart medication that he had been taking for years and was previously legal.

That suspension led to some serious drama during the 2016 Rio Olympics with Sun’s Australian rival Mack Horton calling him a “drug cheat,” leading to the entire country of China turning against Horton.

Yet more drama played out last year as Horton refused to join Sun on the medal stand at the World Aquatics Championship.

British swimmer Duncan Scott similarly snubbed Sun at another event, leading to Sun smirking and telling Scott, “You’re a loser. I’m a winner, yeah?” as they walked off the stage.

A line that is now being thrown back in his face.