US officials launch probe into Chinese swimmers amid doping scandal, World Aquatics says

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Several members of the Chinese national swimming team remain embroiled in a doping scandal. 

The swimmers in question have been under fire since testing positive for the banned heart medication trimetazidine in 2021.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) ultimately cleared the athletes for competition at the Tokyo Olympics. 

Last month, the Chinese Swimming Association selected some of those athletes for its 2024 Olympic team. The swimmers are preparing to travel to compete in Paris later this month.

But on Thursday, World Aquatics revealed that its top administrators had been ordered to testify as witnesses in a U.S. criminal investigation into the case of the 23 Chinese swimmers.

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The Paris La Defense Arena in Nanterre, France, will host swimming and some water polo events during the upcoming Paris Olympic Games.  (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)

The Chinese swimmers won three gold medals at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, a few weeks after WADA said the swimmers' positive tests were at least partially due to inadvertently being exposed to the substance through "contamination." 

The Chinese Doping Agency initially made a similar argument, to which WADA said it was "not in a position to disprove."  

SEVERAL CHINESE SWIMMERS EMBROILED IN DOPING SCANDAL SELECTED FOR PARIS OLYMPICS: REPORT

Those decisions, which World Aquatics also separately reached, were later made public in April via reporting by The New York Times and German broadcaster ARD.

A House committee on China on May 21 asked the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate the case under a federal law that allows probes into