Is India plumbing the depths of the doping nightmare? Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports Mansukh Mandaviya’s revelation in Parliament that 260 Indian athletes have tested positive in 2024 should have shaken the sports ecosystem in the country, but few seemed to have taken note of the startling fact.
This question arises again in the wake of a Wushu athlete’s alleged attempt to use a prohibited method and to tamper with the doping control process. Besides the use of prohibited substances to enhance performance, there have been not a few cases of evasion and whereabouts failures, but instances of athletes being charged with tampering have been rare.
National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) has now charged a minor with using a Prohibited Method and Tampering. It is the first time a minor athlete – who competes in the martial art of Wushu – has been placed on provisional suspension under such charges. It defies understanding who assists minors to indulge in the alleged use of prohibited method and to tamper with the doping control process.
Two of six instances when NADA invoked the Tampering charge involved coaches Mickey Menezes (Athletics) and Naresh Arya (Judo). Rajiv Chakraborty (Swimming, 2012), Shailendra Kumar and Durgesh Khare’s (Athletics. 2013) sanctions included an element of tampering. The minor from Wushu follows them as the fourth to be thus charged.
Of course, there have been instances of athletes attempting to mislead hearing panels, but they have not been considered serious enough for either NADA to lay an additional charge of a compounding offence or hearing panels to take Suo motunotice of such attempts and increase the penalties for such athletes.
For instance, in 2015, a wrestler named Yogesh produced prescriptions for Lasix injections from the famous Bara Hindu Rao hospital in Delhi. NADA did not press charges of the tampering even after it discovered that the there was no record of a doctor who had ostensibly signed the prescription having worked in the hospital.
We will digress just that bit, but only to show that such practices have prevailed in other nations as well. Track and field athletes from Kenya, Russia, Ethiopia and even the United States of America have all been sanctioned for false explanations, fabricate medical records or even altered emails to try and avoid whereabouts failures.
Rio 2016 Olympic marathon gold medalist Jemima Sumgong (Kenya) claimed she tested positive for EPO as she was treated in a Nairobi hospital for sharp abdominal pain, investigators found that there was no record of her being treated in the said hospital. She was awarded an eight-year ban, four for her doping rule violation and an additional four for tampering.
To get back to the Wushu athlete who has become the first Indian minor to be charged with use of prohibited method and tampering brings the focus back on the growing incidence of minors being caught by the anti-doping net. There just seems to be no sign of a fall in the number of minors joining the hall of shame.
It is worrisome that one in every 12 doping cases in India involves a minor. As per information available on the NADA website, 13 minors have been sanctioned by Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panels, 26 have accepted case resolution agreements with NADA – admitting anti-doping rule violations and securing a lesser sanction – and 10 have been placed on provisional suspension.
Since the ADDP orders and agreements are not published, it is only possible to roughly guess the reasons for anti-doping rule violations by teenagers. Even if we consider that a majority of them are aware of the consequences and dope deliberately, some positive tests is the result of a prescription medication and yet others could be due to contaminated supplements.
Importantly, by studying patterns, those in charge of the anti-doping crusade will be able to take greater preventive, rather than merely remedial, action in the future. It can begin with trying to understand why a minor athlete would attempt to use a prohibited method and then tamper with the doping control process.
