(Reuters) – China’s world and Olympic swimming champion Sun Yang will answer allegations about anti-doping violations in an open court hearing on Nov. 15, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) said on Monday.
In a break from usual procedure, CAS said that the case would be held in public in a Montreux hotel in Switzerland after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) appealed against a decision by swimming’s governing body FINA to clear Sun of wrongdoing in a random drug test last September.
Documents leaked to the media revealed that Sun questioned the credentials of the testers before members of his entourage smashed the vials containing his blood samples with a hammer. The 27-year-old has denied any wrongdoing.
The hearing will examine why the vial of blood was destroyed.
“With the agreement of all parties, it is intended to live stream all or parts of the hearing on the CAS website,” CAS said in a statement.
It is only the second time in the history of CAS that a hearing is held in public. The earlier case involved Ireland’s Michelle Smith De Bruin and FINA in 1999.
Triple Olympic champion Sun had served a three-month doping suspension in 2014 for taking the stimulant trimetazidine, which he said he took to treat a heart condition. The substance had been banned a few months before Sun failed the test.
A second doping violation would bring a tougher sanction and rule him out of next year’s Tokyo Olympics.
(Reporting by Shrivathsa Sridhar in Bengaluru, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
