Based on consultation with my legal adviser, sport law practice is different from the above assertion.

CAS, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, uses “comfortable satisfaction” as applicable standard of proof in AD cases. One may argue that the suspected cheating in its nature was similar to doping: a premeditated and organised effort to give athletes an advantage through preparation that circumvents the rules, a kind of information-doping.

“Comfortable satisfaction” is not well defined, but according to CAS “the application of the comfortable satisfaction standard is a constant one, but inherent within that immutable standard is a requirement that the more serious the allegation, the more cogent the supporting evidence must be in order for the allegation to be found proven.”

In any case, “comfortable satisfaction” is somewhere between “beyond reasonable doubt” (applied in criminal cases, say 90% proof) and “on balance of probabilities” (applied in some civil proceedings, say 60% proof). Comfortable satisfaction is unavoidably relying on expert opinions of top practitioners, especially of those who did not participate that very competition but had some experience with the type of terrain and format.

Obviously, there is always a presumption of innocence, i.e. the onus of proof lies with the investigative body. Each charge in each case must be approached with an open mind. But that does not mean that an athlete cannot be found guilty “even if there is a 1% chance that they have not cheated”.

The IOF Code of Ethics is rather vague in many aspects, including the burden of proof required. It is suitable for deciding on terms of ban for drug cheats already convicted by WADA, but gives no proper framework for anything more complex. Hence, the use of CAS standards is reasonable, as CAS is the appeal court to any IOF Ethics Panel decision.

A very exciting AD case study is the Essendon 34. An Ozzie football team was convicted of drug use based on circumstantial evidence a couple of years ago. There was no positive test, and the ASADA could not produce satisfactory evidence to prove the case for each “link in the chain” (when, how and from where was it sourced and administered). When some links of the chain were eventually not proven to a satisfying standard, the case was thrown out. WADA appealed to CAS and successfully argued the case based on “strand in a cable” approach. Each piece of evidence, or “strand”, was not required to bear the entire weight of the standard of proof – because some of the weight could be carried by the other strands. That approach is likely to be more suitable to information-doping cases in orienteering.

It seems clear to me that the main surprise is not that Zhouye was doing well on home ground, but that almost everybody else were performing rather poorly.

Looking into Bulletin 1 for the event the previous map of the area is available. This is from 2016 and looks very much like the map used (and obviouslyold city centres like this doesn’t change much).
Zhouye would have had half year to legally study the map and prepare for everything the course planner could dream up.

Some years ago I interviewed a few of the best Chinese runners and their coach. The runners in the group did two hours map studies together with the coach each day.

To me this seems like a runner (or should I say runners) who have realized that this might be their best or only change of an international result, and prepared way better than anybody else.

In heat C Zhuoye was 27th of 38th finishing 1:18 down on Ralph Street. Street were 42s behind Superman in this heat, which means Zhuoye were exactly 2 minutes behind Superman. This was on a course where the winning time were 10:23, which means Zhuoyes qualification time would mean a time about 3 minutes behind Superman if the qualification would’ve been 15 minutes (at the sprint in China the winning time where 15:18). That is really a lot, when Winsplits only give him 16seconds of mistakes with the conditions 0.03/3s (which should catch almost every small mistakes).

At the normal sprint in Switzerland Zhuoye were 2:21 behind Yannick and 2:46 behind Superman. Winning time was 13:29, which meand Zhuoy would’ve been about 3 minutes behind Superman on a 15 minute race. And this race he did almost perfectly clean, with only 9 seconds of mistake (0.03/3%).

So both races in Switzerland (which the splits shows he executed well technically) shows Zhouyes level to be about 3 minutes behind Superman on a race with winning time on 15 minutes. Then in China he’s only 1:21 behind Superman, which is an improvement of about or more than 1 1/2 minute!

* In Switzerland Li ZhuoYe finished 58th in B-final (93rd of all competitors), 2:21 down on Yannick Michiels and with an average pace of 3:57 min/km.
* In China Zhuoye finished 3rd, 5s down on Yannick with an average pace of 3:50 min/km.

If we look at the splits in Winsplits with the conditions for a mistake set to 0.05 / 5% (normal is 0,20 / 20%, which means with these settings you should be able to spot even very small mistakes) you see that Zhuoye made 5 seconds of mistakes during his run in Switserland. Even with settings 0.03 / 3% he only have 9 seconds of mistakes during that race. Which means he performed a pretty clean race and he’s still more than 2 minutes down.

In China Winsplits gives Zhuoye 18 seconds of mistakes with conditions 0.05 / 5%, but those times comes on the longer legs to 17 and 22 where he just can’t keep the speed up. With 0.03 / 3 % Winsplit adds an additional 4s “mistake” on the pretty easy 14th leg.

For Yannick Winsplit gives 0 error time even on conditions 0.03 / 3% in Switzerland and 5s of mistakes on same conditions in China (which I think deserves some applause for showing pretty damn stable sprint technical performance!!), which means the splits showing Yannick did a pretty clean race in China but probably had less top 3 splits than normal because he showed the ability to slow down when needed to avoid risks.
So back to average pace. In Switzerland, with a almost perfect race, Yannick managed an average pace of 3:22 min/ km. In China, with what seems to actually be an almost perfect race, his speed dropped to 3:49 min / km.

Then look at a few other runners to get more reference data (conditons for mistakes are set to 0.03 / 3%):
Maxime 45th in Switzerland with 57s of mistakes, average pace 3:44
Maxime 2nd in China with 45s of mistake, average pace 3:50

Gaute 23rd in Switzerland with 0s of mistakes, average pace 3:38
Gaute 4th in China with 12s of mistakes, average pace 3:52

Kasper 7th in Switzerland with 18s of mistakes, average pace 3:31
Kasper 7th in China with 23s of mistakes, average pace 3:56

Clearly, everyone slows down quite much in China compared with Switzerland, which is quite understandable when you see the maps. I looked at the gps-tracks (which in China demanded a bit of imagination as the gps-data looked a bit weird) and came up with the following numbers:

In Switzerland Yannick made about 78 distinct changes in running direction. In China Zhuoye made about 103 distinct changes. In China there were also clearly more “full turns”, while the curves in Switzerland genereally were smoother (this sentence was bad, my English is not good enough to find the right words) and thereby faster. In Switzerland the whole course went on hard surface or nice grass areas. In China there were a few parts where one could assume running speed would be lower (im thinking of leg 8-9 and 17-18). I don’t think there is a huge difference in meters of climbing, but it seemed to be maybe a little bit more climbing China. So in general, it’s fair to assume that people would slow down quite a bit in China compared to Switzerland.

But then back to what I started this post with. In Switzerland Zhuoye ran an almost perfectly clean race and his pace was 3:57 min/km. In China he ran 3:50 min/km. So even if he ran without mistakes in Switzerland, he ran the more tricky and slower course in China with a FASTER average pace. Everyone else naturally slowed down, but his speed increased on a more technical and slower course. That is pretty amazing!

(Fun thought: By this logic he should struggle to run below 4 min/km on an athletics track, you know, a track would not be tricky enough for him to get up to speed :) )