An unending drama over a coach

Almost everyone is convinced that if there could be a coach who could guide India to an Olympic medal in athletics in Rio next year it should be Yuriy Ogorodnik. But somehow, the return of the 79-year-old Ukrainian coach who was in charge of the Indian women’s longer relay team when six of the 400m runners were caught in a doping scandal in 2011, has been delayed.
If you go by what the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) has to say on the matter, the delay has now been for more than six months. The Union Sports Ministry concurs with that view about the delay.
Then why this dithering?

“The approval was sanctioned six months ago,” said Union Sports Secretary Ajit Sharan…It is for the AFI to take a call", he told The Hindu on June 19 last..

So, what could be causing further delay?

The media spoils it?

It seems the media is the 'villain'!

“Whenever the ministry seems to be relenting to our constant requests, adverse media reports pop up and the bureaucrats in the ministry again reverse their decision,” the New Indian Express reported on Sunday (July 5), quoting a top AFI official.

According to the above report, the National Anti Doping Agency (NADA) has been asked to file a report on whether Ogorodonik was involved in the doping episode of 2011.

Had some authority charged or suspended the Ukrainian in a doping case? That was the question the ministry had asked the federation, AFI chief Adille Sumariwalla explained to a select group of sportsscribes recently,.

"I had a meeting with sports ministry officials yesterday...and they have sought one last undertaking from AFI that Yuri has not been involved in any dope issue anywhere under the WADA Code," Sumariwalla said in an informal interaction.

"I am going to reply today…that the AFI does not need to give the undertaking in that regard. Anybody can go into the WADA website and find it out. WADA has a database of coaches who has been involved in doping cases," the AFI chief added.

The facts

Before we lose track of the whole issue, let us look at a few facts straightaway.

Ogorodnik was never charged for a doping offence in the 2011 scandal. He was questioned by the Justice Mukul Mudgal enquiry panel appointed by the Government of India. By then he had been sacked by the then Sports Minister, Ajay Maken. He left shortly after deposing before Justice Mudgal. He was not required to come back after that.

Athlete support personnel can be charged with anti-doping rule violations and brought before a disciplinary panel just like the athletes when the latter test positive or evade testers to face sanctions. A charge against a coach could include possession and supply of banned substances or encouragement or abetment to doping. In India no coach or other support personnel had been brought before panels since the advent of NADA. Ogorodnik was spared the ordeal by the ministry and NADA. It is learnt the disciplinary panel was keen to hear him had he been available and had NADA brought forward a charge. No one pursued the case after his departure for Ukraine.

Now for the ministry to find out from AFI whether he was charged or punished in the past is absurd. He had been in India for more than a decade before being shunted out.

Even if the ministry were to look up the information on the WADA website on the advice of Sumariwalla it would find nothing against Ogorodnik there. Nothing against any coach for that matter.  Not even a list of athletes who have been sanctioned since WADA came into being in 2003.

Recently, for the first time, WADA published a report containing all the anti-doping rule violations (ADRVs) for 2013. No names there, just the numbers.

WADA is not a testing agency, only a monitoring agency. It does not initiate disciplinary proceedings against athletes or coaches. That job is left to the federations at the international and national levels and other anti-doping authorities including National Anti-Doping Organisations (NADOs) like NADA in India. WADA does come in when it has reservations about procedures or is not in agreement with a decision rendered by a hearing panel. It has the right of appeal at the national level as well as at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), Lausanne.

The Mudgal report

What happened in 2011 has been known to most of us since then. The ministry has had the benefit of getting an official report of an enquiry committee (Mudgal panel). Justice Mudgal did not put the blame on Ogorodnik for the doping offences committed by the six 400m runners plus two others. But he did raise enough doubts about what had been going on. And, quite pertinently, the report squarely blamed the coach for the “negligence” that led to the positive tests of six women 400m runners, three of them in the gold-winning relay teams of 2010 Commonwealth Games and Asian Games. Eventually, CAS slapped two-year bans on the girls on the argument that they were "negligent" in consuming the supplement provided by the coach.

The Mudgal report has not been made public. For an authority that keeps seeking transparency from the National federations that are advised to post all possible information on their websites, did the ministry ever think of publishing the Mudgal report on its website all these years?

The preliminary report mentions ‘testosterone’ and a ‘white tablet’ 

Ogorodnik has not agreed that he is the author of those charts. He owned up the one containing supplements. What other substances were listed in those charts? No one knows.

A latest report in the Times of India quotes an unnamed coach to say “Yuri’s room was like a dispensary”!

Can NADA probe the charges?

The report also raises doubts about alleged doping practices indulged in by relay runners prior to last year’s Asian Games in Incheon. Another report recently had hinted at “advice” received by the Asian Games probables from Ukraine.

If the USADA, the UKAD and the UK Athletics are probing the charges made in the recent BBC Panorama programme about alleged doping practices indulged in by legendary marathoner and coach Alberto Salazar, is it possible for our own NADA to probe further into these charges even at this late stage?

But for that to happen, it will need the green signal from the ministry. After all, NADA is only a department of the ministry, not an ‘independent agency’ as it should be and as is often made out. It is headed by a Joint Secretary of the ministry. Its Governing Body is full of government officers or its nominees and the Sports Minister is its chairman.

NADA can at best quote the relevant portions of the Mudgal report which had been passed onto it by the ministry if it has to submit a report to the latter on the 2011 doping episode involving the six relay runners and Ogorodnik!

NADA does not have the machinery to dig into the past, gather information from different sources, say during the 2002-2006 period, to give its opinion on Ogorodnik and his methods since it came into being in 2009 and it is quite often hamstrung because of its meagre work force.

NADA does have the orders of the Dinesh Dayal-headed disciplinary panel and the Justice C. K. Mahajan-headed appeal panel that heard the cases of the six elite woman athletes in the widely-reported doping incident of 2011.

Coach blamed for supply of contaminated supplement

Contrary to what had been claimed by AFI president in his recent interaction with the Press, those orders do not mention that the banned substances came from products purchased by the women athletes themselves. In fact the decisions of both the hearing panels were dependent on the argument that the banned steroids came from the Ginseng purchased from China by the coach and the girls were unaware about the source or what it contained. This is corroborated by the Mudgal committee report also.

Neither the Mudgal committee nor the hearing panels sought to know or order or advise NADA or any other agency to find out who asked the coach to purchase Ginseng from China, whether there was any invoice to prove such purchase and who paid for it.

The ministry, which had initially rejected the proposal to bring back Ogorodnik, ostensibly following an appeal made by a former high-ranking international athlete, has tried to pass the buck around since then. It looks ready to continue the exercise.

As the AFI official says in the TOI report above, if the ministry feels the Ukrainian has to be brought back for the sake of India having a shy at an Olympic medal, it should do so though at the cost of further embarrassment among the international anti-doping community. After all, India is a signatory to the UNESCO Convention against doping in sports and it is its duty to do everything possible to deter and discourage the practice of doping and individuals even if there could be nothing strictly within the rules against re-appointing a sacked coach.

And what about other Indian coaches? Instead of hiding behind “sources” or  as“a coach” in media reports they should come out and speak in one voice if they do feel Ogorodnik's recall would be a retrograde step and it could harm Indian athletics which is struggling any way to shed its ‘doped image’.

The qualification race

There has been some mention about preparing a team for the World Championships in Beijing in August in one of the reports mentioned above. India has to ensure its place among the qualifiers first to do that. The same of course goes for the Olympics, but then there is plenty of time left for Rio.

As things stand towards World Championships participation, with its Asian Games gold-winning mark of  2014, that of 3:28.68,  India stands a good chance to make it to Beijing next month though there should be no guarantee.

The best mark of a team from January 2014 to August 2015 would be taken into account while drawing up the qualification lists of 16. The top eight teams from the World Relays in 2014 (Brazil, France, Britain, Italy, Jamaica, Nigeria, Poland and USA) have already been included in the selection.

That means eight more will make it. And that may include the likes of Russia (third in this year’s lists), Ukraine, Germany etc. At this point, the “true strength” of the possible Indian quartet is unknown since none of the suspended batch of 2011, all of whom except Tiana Mary Thomas had been included among the TOP Scheme for Olympics, has competed this season. In Sini Jose’s case, since February 2011.

Waiting for the magic!

Whatever be the immediate target,  the SAI  and the ministry, it would seem, are keen to bring back Ogorodnik just as the AFI is. He was the man responsible for India making the Olympics final in 4x400 in Athens in 2004, cracking the national record on the way with a time of 3:26.89. The girls will have to aim for something close to 3:20 to be in with any chance of a medal in Rio. An impossible task by current standards, but obviously all the three agencies dealing with the coach's appointment would differ with such an assessment.

Can Ogorodnik produce the magic as he did (even if it ended only in seventh place for the team in Athens) in 2004? The ministry does not want to be seen as the one blocking an "Indian medal in Olympics" while the NADA has to provide the clincher in this unending drama over a dope-tainted coach.
(updated 13 July 2015)