“As an organisation we will always advocate for fairness and integrity, and we believe that all athletes deserve the right to earn success by their own hard work, effort, and dedication.

“Clean sport is about respect for your competitors. It’s about respect for yourself. It’s about respect for sport. At this stage we are making our own inquiries with World Aquatics, until we know more we aren’t in a position to comment further.”

The World Anti Doping Agency earlier said 23 Chinese swimmers were cleared to compete at Tokyo despite testing positive for a banned heart medication because it agreed with Chinese authorities and ruled that their samples had been contaminated.

Australian swimmer Lani Pallister was asked about the scandal on Nine’s Wide World of Sports on Sunday.

“Obviously, if the claims are true, it’s extremely disappointing for the athletes that had those opportunities taken away from them at the Tokyo Games,” Pallister said.

“I wasn’t there. So obviously I can only guess or dream of how they all feel. But, yeah, there’s still more information that has to come out. And I don’t think Swimming Australia has had contact from World Anti Doping or that sort of thing yet, so obviously not all the details are out yet. But yeah, my heart is with the athletes that might be affected by that situation.”

WADA said the swimmers tested positive for the heart medication trimetazidine in the months leading up to the start of the Olympics in 2021 but that Chinese authorities told the agency the positives were the result of contamination.

“Ultimately, we concluded that there was no concrete basis to challenge the asserted contamination,” WADA’s senior director of science and medicine Olivier Rabin said.

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The 30 member Chinese swim team won six medals in Tokyo, including three golds.

Many of the athletes still compete for China and are expected to swim at the Olympics this year.

WADA also responded to what it called “some misleading and potentially defamatory media coverage this week” and explained the process it undertook upon learning about the positive tests.

The global drug fighting organisation said it also had been given a tip by the US Anti Doping Agency as early as 2020 – before this case arose – about allegations of doping cover ups in China but that USADA never followed up with evidence.

USADA chief executive Travis Tygart called the news of the Chinese positive tests “crushing.”

“It’s even more devastating to learn the World Anti Doping Agency and the Chinese Anti Doping Agency secretly, until now, swept these positives under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world,” Tygart said.

World Aquatics told the Daily Telegraph it was confident “that these (adverse analytical findings) were handled diligently and professionally, and in accordance with all applicable anti doping regulations, including the World Anti Doping Code.”

The drug at the centre of this case was also the medication that led to the suspension of Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva at the Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022.

In that case, WADA moved quickly to sanction Valieva upon learning about her positive test.

The case underscores what many view as a flaw in the global anti doping system – that a country’s own anti doping organisation is often the first line of defense in catching drug cheats and those organisations have different levels of motivation to fulfill that role.