In separate interviews, German world champions Britta Steffen and Paul Biedermann have attacked the current anti-doping regime and suggested that constant out-of-competition vigilance of athletes is too heavy handed.
In Sport Bild, Biedermann, world 200m and 400m world champion and record holder, is pictured next to a headline that screams "Will swimmers soon be treated worse than criminals?" He is quoted as saying: "No-one wants to know whether we trained better than other people. Soon they will put shackles on our feet so that the doping testers know where we are and we will be treated worse than serious criminals."
Steffen, world 50m and 100m free champion and record holder, tells a university publication today: "Just the time it [anti-doping testing] takes is enormous. The thing has got little to do with civil rights. I have to tell people months in advance which day and which hour I won't be available. Every day my daily schedule has to be mailed to the doping controllers so that I am reachable at any time. If I tell people that that's how doping control works they can't believe it."
Like Biedermann, Steffen is supportive of the need for rigorous anti-doping tests, and attacks FINA for not playing as full a role as it might. Of the 30 or so test samples he has provided so far this year, all were provided to NADA, the German anti-doping agency. He has not been visited by FINA or WADA controllers at all, the article claimed. Biedermann said: "What's FINA spending its money on? At the world championships in Rome FINA did not take a single blood test - that can't be right."
In the wake of this article, FINA exec director Cornel Marculescu correctly pointed out that both Biedermann and Steffen were in fact visited three times each by FINA testing agents in 2009.
The German federation, the DSV, operates a blood controls regime as part of its anti-doping measures. The regime was partly the work of Orjan Madsen, the Norwegian coach who headed the German national team in the build-up to Beijing 2008 and was outspoken about Germany's need to be more vigilant than others because of the sorry past of the GDR.
On that score, some of the comments from Biedermann and Steffen are likely to be viewed dimly in some quarters: neither swimmer had anything to do with the East German doping regime and State Plan 14:25 that cheated the world and made victims of its own children and of rivals around the world for the best part of 20 years but both world champions were East-German born and are coached by men linked to the former East German sports machine.
That, of course, does not imply guilt. Times have, thankfully, changed but the lessons of the GDR years and those from Michelle Smith to China in the 1990s are clear: human beings cheat. They manipulate the truth, they cheat to win and to deprive others of their justly earned place in sporting history and the life that flows from sporting success.
It is because of the GDR, because of the sporting crime of the century (state plan 14:25), because of the abuse of young athletes, because of the mockery that such cheating makes of sport (and not just from the GDR but China, Smith de Bruin and others along the way) and the fact that there are men and women, including doctors and scientists (in the mould of Dr Lothar Kipke and Zhao Ming) and some of those who have taken the Hippocratic Oath, out there today trying to find new ways of cheating with methods that are either undetectable under the current testing regime or have not yet been accounted for by those who control the anti-doping fight.
Daily vigilance is important. And even then, many slip the net. Some while back we mentioned a team of swimmers found "training" at a remote place in eastern Europe. The training venue had no pool, only gym facilities. On the day that the swimmers were cited, several weightlifters were tested and most were subsequently found positive and served suspensions. The testers had no permit to test any swimmers that day. Pity - both for the swimmers, who would then be able to prove their innocence in dubious circumstances if ever asked to account (and the circumstances dictate that we do not name those in question), and the anti-doping regime, which has improvements to make to its regime if it is serious about catching people who are best understood by those trained in criminal pathology.
Many around the world will sympathise with those who complain of the nuisance that inflicts the lives of the likes of Biedermann and Steffen. But it is a nuisance worth putting up with, worth tolerating, even worth welcoming - provided, of course, that all those responsible for anti-doping testing are doing their very best to catch cheats. Few could say, hand on heart, that the current testing regime is as smart, as efficient and as meaningful as those who control testing programmes and like to boast of nil returns like to have us all believe.
Meantime, Steffen, studying business and engineering, says that it takes "a lot of discipline to structure sport and study ... but I need something to work my brain or I would be pretty unhappy." Studying is an escape to a private life in which she is not known as "Steffen, the famous swimmer". She says: "Most of my fellow students don't even know who I am. If you talk of swimmers you think of big, heavy people but luckily I don't look like that at all." When she retires from the race pool, Steffen would like to apply her studies and experiences by working in child development - but not in the pool.
Biedermann, like Steffen, is focussed on London 2012. But he has a short-term goal too for the season ahead: passing his driving test.
