Chinese teenager at centre of doping allegations leaves the controversy – and her opponents – behind her in the pool
As eight swimmers took to the blocks for the women's 200m individual medley at the Aquatic Centre on Tuesday night, it was impossible to distinguish, from their demeanour at least, which of them was at the centre of an international storm commanding the attention of the sport's highest authorities.
All eight waved to the crowd, walked to their blocks, adjusted their caps, goggles and costumes, flapped their arms and jumped. The entry of Hannah Miley, the British record holder, in lane 1 was greeted with an enormous roar by the devoted crowd. But it was the white cap in lane 4 on whom all non-partisan eyes were focused.
Two minutes, seven seconds and 57 hundredths later it was all over, and the Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen, after a thrilling final 50m that saw her take the lead from Australia's Alicia Coutts, was a double Olympic champion.
The world of swimming may have spent 36 hours in a ferocious debate over the means by which she could achieve such astonishing feats, but the 16-year-old had other things on her mind. As the electronic beep sounded to mark the start of the race, she leapt from the blocks, put her head down, and swam.
Her victory was not a foregone conclusion. The teenager was not first off the blocks, and turned only in fourth place after the first butterfly length. She pulled back some of the ground in the middle 100m to turn second for home, but it was on the final freestyle leg that the race was won, when she inched ahead of the Australian, and finally took the race comfortably. Her time earned her a new Olympic record.
Coutts took silver in 2.08.15 and bronze was claimed by Caitlin Leverenz of the US. Miley finished in seventh place.
On Saturday, Ye had stunned a crowd that thought it had already seen the shock of the evening 40 minutes before, when the great Michael Phelps failed to win a medal in the men's 400m individual medley.
In the women's race of the same event, Ye swam a final freestyle leg of such jawdropping acceleration that she overhauled the race leader, finishing almost three metres ahead in a time which shattered the world record. On Monday, in qualifying for Tuesday night's event, she had gone on to break the Olympic record for the longer distance.
It was awesome, astonishing, unbelievable. And it didn't take too long for a leading US coach to say what many had been muttering.
"We want to be very careful about calling it doping," John Leonard told the Guardian. "The one thing I will say is that history in our sport will tell you that every time we see something, and I will put quotation marks around this, 'unbelievable', history shows us that it turns out later on there was doping involved."
Ye herself will have spent Tuesday quietly, focusing mentally on the task ahead, warming up as she does before every race.
But while the schoolgirl prepared, a global controversy was raging around her sparked by Leonard's comments.
Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps's coach, defended the swimmer. "I think it is unfair to immediately just jump on someone who has had an extraordinary swim," he said. "I think you have to … not make judgments too quickly. I had not seen her swim much before this but she is beautiful technically and she is swimming well."
China's anti-doping chief also spoke out in her defence, describing the insinuation that she had used banned substances as "not proper" and describing her critics as "just biased". "We never questioned Michael Phelps when he bagged eight golds in Beijing," he said.
Her father, too, stepped into the fray, telling the Chinese news portal Tencent that while it was "normal" for people to be suspicious, "the western media has always been arrogant and suspicious of Chinese people".
And despite plenty of commentary about China's historic and more recent history of doping in the sport – with five junior swimmers banned in 2009 after testing positive for the anabolic agent clenbuterol, and another female swimmer, Li Zhesi, dropped from the Olympic squad in March after a positive test – there remains no evidence against the teenager, who has never failed a drugs test.
As for Ye herself, who lists her ambitions on the London 2012 website as "To win a gold medal at the 2012 Olympics", her response to the insinuations was to say: "The Chinese team keep very firmly to the anti-doping policies, so there is absolutely no problem."
She has previously been more expansive in explaining her own remarkable achievements, putting them down to hard work and a ferocious determination: "If the coach asks me to practise 10,000 metres, I would never be lazy to swim 9,900 metres instead."