The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) decided to postpone its hearing on the decision by FINA, the governing body of swimming, to clear Chinese star Sun Yang of doping allegations, saying the hearing will be held in public.

The hearing was scheduled for September but the legal body released a statement on Tuesday saying, "CAS is conducting an appeal arbitration procedure brought by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) against the Chinese swimmer Sun Yang and the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA) in relation to a decision issued by the FINA Doping Panel dated January 3, 2019, whereby Sun Yang was found not having committed an anti-doping rule violation following an out-of-competition doping control."

The 27-year-old already denied any wrongdoing related to the 2018 allegations and earlier requested to make the hearing public.

In its media release the Lausanne-based organization informed, "The CAS confirms, further to consultation with the parties, that a hearing was tentatively scheduled for September 2019 but due to unexpected personal circumstances, one of the parties was obliged to request a postponement of the hearing. Such request was assented to by the other parties and accepted by the CAS Panel. A new hearing date will be fixed as soon as possible but is unlikely to be before the end of October 2019."

"At the parties' request, the hearing, which will likely take place in Switzerland, will be open to the public (including the media)," the CAS statement mentioned.

Interestingly, the only previous CAS hearing to be held in public was way back in 1999 and was related to swimming as well when Irish swimmer Michelle Smith de Bruin took on the FINA at the court.

Sun, who won gold in the 200m freestyle at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games and the 400m and 1500m freestyle at the 2012 Olympics in London, clinched the 200m and 400m freestyle titles at the 2019 FINA World Championships in Gwangju, South Korea, last month.