Gwangju, South Korea The catchphrase for this year's FINA World Swimming Championships, proudly displayed on banners around the main venues and across the southern Korean city, is saturated with irony: "Dive into Peace".
Not withstanding the sound of fighter jets constantly roaring skywards to patrol the airspace for Russian and Chinese interlopers in this delicate part of the globe, the reality in the competition pool could hardly be more divorced from the uplifting marketing slogan.
There was a feeling at the Rio Olympic Games that the athlete revolt against doping had reached a tipping point. Swimmers Mack Horton and Lilly King, with their brash public rebukes of China's Sun Yang and Russia's Yulia Efimova, became the faces of a frustrated competing cohort that felt they must act when their governing body, in that case FINA, would not.
Three years later, that hostility has not only refused to subside but reached new levels of animosity at the World Championships. Sun, once again, has become a lightning rod of resentment but the reasons are more complex than a simple rebuke to his past doping infringement – he was banned for three months in 2014 – and the current one in which he finds himself immersed.
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Sun finds himself at the apex of a suite of swirling, intersecting narratives and circumstances that all provide context to a swimming meet crackling with tension that has seen athletes like Horton, King, Adam Peaty and Duncan Scott in open revolt.
Much of the anger is directed towards FINA, a governing body which, as they say in the Australian football codes, has well and truly "lost the dressing room". Many of the sport's highest-profile athletes consider it to be inept, bloated by muddling bureaucrats, incapable of dealing with serious issues like doping and saddled with a stubborn unwillingness to evolve into a modern, dynamic sporting organisation.
"I win, you lose": Gold medalist China's Sun Yang, right, gestures to Britain's bronze medalist Duncan Scott.Credit:Mark Schiefelbein/AP
None of FINA's leaders have been available for interview in Gwangju as the event catches fire around them, culminating in the protests from Horton and Scott. In waiting for it all to just go away, they have shown again they simply cannot read the room.
Adam Peaty, the Britishbreaststroke star and one of the sport's real stars, made the startling admission before the event that he had met FINA's president Julio Maglione just once. That would be the same Maglione that lovingly embraced Sun in 2017 when he was receiving gold for his 400m triumph in the world titles in Kazan.
FINA's executive director Cornel Marculescu is another fond of throwing his arms around the towering Chinese great. Sun once referred to him as something akin to a grandfather and in Rio, thanked him for helping him through a turbulent Games that began with Horton's taunt that Sun was a "drug cheat".
"Marcu is a very good friend of [the] Chinese swim team and he actually watched me like a grandfather. So I was very happy to see him see me win the gold. I hope this friendship will last," Sun said at the time.
It all adds to the perception among other swimmers that Sun remains a protected species within the sport and a teacher's pet among the FINA hierarchy, who endure his behaviour because he remains their real golden child; the most popular athlete in one of the most powerful and populous nations on the planet.
"I don't think it's personal at all," Australis's Mitch Larkin said of the protests against Sun in Gwangju. "I race [Chinese backstroker] Xu [Jiayu] a lot and people speculate all sorts of things. If you were trying to pick which athletes were clean or not, you'd be there all day, or all year.
"The way I look at it is, everyone is clean until proven otherwise. For me, Mack and Duncan are standing up to FINA to show we do believe in clean sport and we want to to make sure every opportunity is taken to ensure it is clean. If we didn't want clean sport, we wouldn't be here every day racing."
Sun is competing in South Korea under the cloud of a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) appeal against a FINA doping panel ruling that cleared him of destroying a sample of blood with a hammer that was due to be taken for testing.
Mack Horton (left) made his point against Sun Yang (centre).Credit:EPA
He and his team had issues with some of the identification documents of the nurse that drew the blood. According to the 59-page report of the incident, she was registered to draw blood in China but not that particular province, a technicality that ended in a long standoff and eventually, a smashed sample.
WADA's appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) will he heard in September and his fate will be decided after lawyers pour over technical legal details that will centre around who had what documents and whether they were sufficient.
His interactions with FINA and WADA are central to his role as the sport's arch-villain but in so many other ways, Sun fails to endear himself to his fellow athletes or anyone outside his fanatical Chinese fan base, who travel in numbers to wherever he competes.
He tried to antagonise Horton in training in Rio and was in 2015 accused by Alberto Pinto da Silva, Brazil's head coach, of kicking and elbowing Larissa Oliveira and causing issues for other athletes in a crowded pool.
"The South African [coach] said he bothered the swimmers when they were swimming. Chile, Argentina, everyone came to tell me what do to. If he's doing that to everyone then he's a dangerous guy, he has no place in sport," Pinto da Silva said at the time. A complaint was mRead More – Source
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