Rio 2016: Sun Yang gets the last laugh to answer Mack Horton's 'drug cheat' taunt with 200m gold medal

The Chinese swimmer Sun Yang said on Monday night that he had answered Australian Mack Horton, who accused him to his face of being a drug cheat, by winning Olympic gold in the 200m freestyle.

Yang, who was lucky to escape with a three-month ban in 2014 after testing positive for a banned heart medication, was fronted up by Horton after the Australian beat him in the 400m freestyle.

But Yang said he would not allow outside comments to affect him. “He (Horton) is a great athlete but he didn’t take a medal tonight,” said Yang. “I’m now in a good state. I just need to focus on myself I won’t focus on external things.”

Yang said that if he had executed Friday’s 400m correctly he would have beaten Horton. “I’m sorry I didn’t execute my responsibility. In different circumstances I should have won two gold medals.”

Horton found himself at the centre of an attack on social media after saying of Yang after beating him to gold in the 400m: “I just have a problem with him testing positive and still competing." The lenient sentence handed out to the controversial swimmer raised questions about Chinese swimming’s approach to doping.

But Yang insisted that his problems were behind him. “What is past is past,” he said. “The toughest time is in the past. The medal to me means you have to work even harder.”

The American swimmer Lilly King supported Horton’s comments about Yang. “[Respect] to him for speaking out first,” she said. “He said what everyone was thinking and I said what everything was thinking.”