KOREA TO RETHINK DOUBLE-WHAMMY DOPING RULE IN WAKE OF PARK TAE-HWAN SUSPENSION"
South Korea's Olympic Committee said today that it is considering easing its eligibility rules for athletes to make national ports teams. The rethink comes just two days after Park Tae-hwan was banned for 18 months for a positive test in September last year.
Now, that extra time may be regarded as “unfair or excessive”, Korean Olympic Committee official Park Dong-hee told AP today. The timing suggests that any easing would be in direct response to the Park case, even though Park Dong-hee denies that. He said:
“We will never bend our rules for the interest of an individual athlete, but it is true that the suspension of Park Tae-hwan triggered a debate on whether the rule is legally appropriate.”
The last two words cut to the chase: a challenge at the Court of Arbitration for Sport would have a slim chance of ending with the Korean rule still in place.
The KOC’s competition and disciplinary committees is now to review the domestic rule before the organisation’s board of directors decides on any amendments. That process could take around free months, by which time there may also have been progress in the prosecution of the doctor who gave Park a testosterone injection after what he swimmer claims was his repeated questions seeking assurance that he injection he was about to receive did not contain anything on the banned substances list.
Amendment to the Korean rule may be a matter of reducing the time frame down from three years or running the panel from the star of any suspension period. The process may also take into account ‘extraneous circumstances’. The review may also look at the need for a rule designed to keep athletes out of the Olympic Games at a time when the highest category of doping offence came with a two-year bar. Under the 2015 WADA Code, that penalty has gone up to four years.
Park Tae-hwan, meanwhile, has induced that he would like to race at Rio 2016. The first and only South Korean swimmer to have won an Olympic swim medal – topped by how 400m free gold in 2008 – he is a household name and known as Marine Boy at home.
The positive doping test has tainted Park’s public image, some say irrevocably. He lost the six medals gained at a home Asian Games in Incheon last year at a venue named after him.
At those same Games, Sun Yang, of China, raced to more titles knowing that he had served a three-month doping suspension in secret and knowing that the doctor banned with him continued to work with him, on the deck in Incheon, during a year-long suspension in contravention of FINA rules and the WADA Code. That and the case of Yuliya Efimova are among the big-profile cases weighing hazily on swimming’s image of late.
Park’s management released a statement apologising for the public disappointment caused by the scandal. Lee Kee-heung, president of the Korean Swimming Federation, has now asked for he swimmer to make his apology in person at a press conference.