Decorated American was on the relay that finished second to a China team that included a swimmer who had tested positive months earlier.
Katie Ledecky, with 4x200 relay teammates Allison Schmitt, Paige Madden, Kathryn McLaughlin after finishing second during the Tokyo Olympics. in the final of the women’s 800-meter freestyle relay at the Tokyo Olympics, stopping the clock with a time that would have given the Americans a world record in the event — except for the quartet of Chinese swimmers two lanes over, who out-touched them by four-tenths of a second, taking both the gold medal and the world record.
At the time, no one within the larger swimming community was aware that Zhang and many of her teammates had tested positive seven months earlier. Since the story broke this spring, WADA has defended its actions, or lack thereof, saying it investigated extensively and had no basis to challenge China’s explanation of an accidental contamination.
Stanford women’s swimming coach Greg Meehan, who coached Ledecky from 2016 to 2021 and served as the women’s coach for Team USA at the Tokyo Olympics, decried the “complete lack of transparency” on the part of WADA. In a post on X, he said the case confirmed the swimming community’s fears that doping could be rampant during the pandemic because of the complicated logistics of testing athletes in different countries with different quarantine protocols.
“This would’ve been their only gold medal from Tokyo,” Ledecky said of Schmidt and Forde. “We were proud of that relay performance. We broke the world record. Allison would’ve had her second world record . There are a lot of questions that need to be answered.”In an Instagram post following news of the Chinese positive tests, Schmidt recalled being drug-tested following that relay and wrote, “It saddens me that … the purity of competition pushed aside for money and politics.
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