Ye Shiwen's Olympic swim gold 'not impossible'

Ye Shiwen's world record in the women's 400 metres Olympic individual medley has been called "unbelievable" ? but it may just be exceptional. Ye, age 16, swam the distance in 4 minutes 28.43 seconds, covering the last 50 metres 0.17 seconds faster than US gold medalist Ryan Lochte did in the men's event, knocking 5 seconds off her best time in the process.

"I wouldn't typically expect a female swimmer to out-swim a male swimmer at Olympic level, unless something had gone wrong for the male," says sports physiologist Mitch Lomax of the University of Portsmouth, UK. "But I wouldn't say that it's physiologically impossible."

John Leonard of the World Swimming Coaches Association called Ye's performance "unbelievable", but Ye and the Chinese team have denied allegations of doping. All Olympic medalists are drug-tested. An extraordinary performance by an individual athlete could trigger extra tests, but as New Scientist went to press the Olympic anti-doping lab, based in Harlow, outside London, would not confirm or deny whether these tests had been carried out for Ye. The British Olympic Association said Ye was "clean".

Kevin Moran, a former competitive swimmer and lecturer in health at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, says that elite athletes normally experience the law of diminishing returns. "Leaps in performance at the lower end of the performance scale are normal," he says. But at the top end of elite performance, they are "unexpected".

More heart

"One of the main physiological differences between men and women, related to endurance sport, is that women generally have relatively smaller hearts," says physiologist Andrew Jones of the University of Exeter, UK. On top of this men produce more of the sex hormone testosterone, which acts like a natural doping agent, promoting haemoglobin production so the blood can carry more oxygen. The maximum amount of oxygen that can reach a woman's muscles is, on average, lower than that for a man. Less oxygen means less energy.

John Brewer of UK Anti-Doping and Director of Sport at the University of Bedfordshire, says that it should not be considered too surprising when an exceptional athlete emerges from a population the size of China's. He also points out that samples from athletes are stored for eight years after each Olympics. Athletes who are later found to have used illegal drugs can be disqualified.

This is because, as the World Anti-Doping Agency has acknowledged, the contest between dopers and testers is unequal, with the athletes in the lead.

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