Delhi sprinter Abhi Sirohi, who has not yet turned 14 years of age, is among the 100-plus athletes who are provisionally suspended by National Anti-Doping Agency, following positive tests for banned substances and pending proceedings before the National Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panels.
He clocked a National Record time of 7.21 seconds in winning the Boys U14 60m final in the National Junior Athletics Championships in Coimbatore on November 8 last year. In March this year, Athletics Federation of India website updated the results to show that he had been disqualified for being overage.
As per a list posted on the NADA website earlier this week, Abhi Sirohi is the only minor among the 109 athletes on provisional suspension. However, since the resolution of cases of as many as 11 minors from earlier lists have not been made public, it must be assumed that they are still serving provisional suspension.
Besides, of the 180 who admitted doping and accepted Agreed Sanctions (Articles 10.8 and 8.3 of NADA Rules 2021), as many as 20 are minors. When we add the six minors who have been sanctioned bans, ranging from two to six years, by ADDPs, we are looking at 38 minors from eight disciplines who have tested positive for banned substances.
Of these, 13 are weightlifters and 12 from Athletics. Boxing and Judo (3 each), Swimming, Volleyball and Wrestling (2 each) and Kabaddi (1) complete the set of sport from which minors have tested positive for banned substances. The 38 minor athletes represent a whopping 8.2 per cent of the 461 athletes who NADA has declared as ineligible for competition.
Are these minors caught in doping net destined to be just numbers? By all accounts, it would appear that these have been reduced to mere statistics, each case only adding up to the numbers. Nobody seems to have made a systemic effort to understand the malaise and attack it. The efforts seem to stop at educating athletes about the harmful effects of doping.
It is imperative that there is a deeper study into the trends, especially among the minors so that India can win the war against doping. The NADA investigative team must take this up on priority and get to the bottom of it all. It will curtail the apparently unfettered run that unscrupulous coaches and others seem to be having at the expense of these minors.
Why does one believe that the minors are being used by the unscrupulous? Why does one get the feeling that these teenagers are being pushed to take shortcuts? The answers are not far to seek and lie in the nature of the prohibited substances that have been detected in their urine samples.
Even a cursory look at the substances detected in the samples of the 20 minors who agreed to doping offences and accepted 3 year bans and the 12 minors placed on provisional suspension is revealing. It is not as if they have taken some medicine for common cold or a viral fever and have consequently tested positive.
The presence of substances ranging from Stanozolol and Nandrolone (19-norandosterone) to Darbepoetin (dEPO), from selective androgen receptor modulators like Ligandrol and Ostarine to Methyltestosterone and Dehydrochloromethyl Testosterone indicates that it is not inadvertent violations but deliberate doping that has occurred.
It is hard to believe that minors would be taking shortcuts on their own. And that is precisely why the entire sports ecosystem must raise the bar in protecting the minors not from the scourge of doping but also from the attendant issues, including social and emotional. Few of these minors will have coping mechanisms and would feel the adverse impact.
World Anti-Doping Agency’s public report of Operation Refuge: An Examination of Doping Among Minors in 2022 said minors felt deep trauma following a positive test and sanction. They described the trauma they or a loved one felt when being removed from sport and rejected by friends or family members, and how this rejection led to a significant psychological impact.
It is time for India to investigate the rising incidence of doping among minors. It may the most important piece in the battle to cleanse sport and give all competitors a level playing field.
