Chinese Olympian Sun Yang loses appeal at Swiss court.
Chinese Olympic champion swimmer Sun Yang lost his final appeal against a doping sanction, which bans the athlete from competing until June 2024, the Swiss Federal Court announced.
The punishment handed down by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) was "not contrary to the fundamental principles of the legal order", and Sun Yang's right to be heard "had not been violated", the Swiss Court ruled.
Sun was banned in June last year for refusing to give a sample to doping inspectors, turned confrontational after questioning the credibility of the officials who went to get some samples at his home in China.
The three time Olympic champion then ordered a security guard to use a hammer to smash the casing of a blood vial so it would not be valid for testing.
His actions provoked the judges and found Sun "to have acted recklessly" when he refused to let anti-doping officials leave his home with a sample of his blood.
His sanction prohibited him from joining the Tokyo Olympics but will be able to compete in the 2024 Paris Games as the ban will ultimately expire in May of 2024.
Sun was first banned for eight years by CAS in 2020 but the Lausanne-based court reduced its original ban after his legal team appealed to Switzerland’s federal court because the CAS panel chairman showed anti-China bias in social media comments.
The 33-year-old’s second ban was imposed after a rare CAS hearing held in open court and streamed live online which lasted more than 10 hours in November 2019 at a special court session in Montreux, Switzerland.
Sun was ordered to pay legal costs of 15,000 Swiss francs ($16,300).
This final ruling should end a legal case that lasted more than three years since Sun was merely warned by the swimming governing body.
Tags: #China, #swimming, #olympics