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| Muhammed Anas (leading here) and Arokia Rajiv at the Asian championships in 2017. Both were among those not tested by NADA in 2018 before Asian Games_Pic G. Rajaraman |
Ten of
the 25 athletes in the NADA Registered Testing Pool (RTP) were not tested at
all out of competition in 2018. Nine other athletes in the pool were tested
once out of competition through the year in clear breach of World Anti-Doping
Agency (WADA) regulations.
These
startling revelations in the testing statistics, made available by NADA, has
strengthened the belief that NADA has been either trying to “protect” the
leading athletes or is disinterested in catching the dope cheats among the top
track and field athletes of the country. Whether the malady extended to other
sports as well or not will require detailed review by a competent authority.
Out-of-competition
testing is the foundation on which anti-doping measures have to be built.
Leading athletes have to be monitored and tested so that they keep away from
the temptation of consuming performance-enhancing drugs.
In the
majority of cases in 2018, NADA seemed to have allowed the top athletes an
out-of-competition dope-test-free window of four to six months in the run-up to
the Asian Games. Was it done unwittingly, or was there complicity? These are
questions that come up the moment one is struck by the staggering statistics of
out-of-competition testing in athletics in 2018.
Anti-doping
is a cat-and-mouse game. The element of surprise in testing an athlete is the
key to catching a dope cheat. An anti-doping authority has to draw up the best
possible test distribution plan (TDP) to ensnare the offenders. It is often a
difficult task since the dopers know when to make themselves available for
testing so that they would not get caught.
Those
who fall easily into the trap are amateurs or else the odd experienced elite
athlete who might have made a slight miscalculation in the “tapering off”
process to fall into the trap. Positive tests during competitions are rare. The
dopers are clever enough to avoid a positive test.
It is
foolish to imagine that athletes would come into competition stuffed with
steroids or take a shot of stimulant mephentermine just before “call room”
entry. Professionals know when and how to do it and escape detection, often
with the help of support staff.
‘Whereabouts’ testing
One of
the instruments that the WADA has devised for the purpose of taking a
prospective cheat by surprise is the RTP. It allows an authority to keep track
of an athlete every day of the year at a pre-designated place so that the
athlete does not evade testers. In theory, at least, that is the idea. In
practice, we do know there are many loopholes to evade and explain an absence.
This is
called “whereabouts”-based testing. Athletes are required to provide locations
they would be available at for at least one hour every day so that testers can
come and take samples if required. Three missed tests or filing failures can
attract a suspension ranging up to two years.
The
Asian Games year should have been crucial in terms of tracking the top athletes
who had the best chance to bring home medals. NADA not only failed to effect
changes in its outdated testing pool but also failed to test those in the RTP
with any meaningful periodicity in mind.
Ten of
the 25 athletes in the pool were not tested out of competition, four of them
not undergoing any test at all through the year.
Ten
others in the 25 were tested once out of competition, most of them after the
Asian Games or just weeks before the Games, making it meaningless for the
purpose of catching them by surprise if they were into doping.
Surprisingly,
javelin thrower Annu Rani was tested five times out of competition last year,
the most in track and field. She was also tested at four competitions.
Initially rejected by the selection committee since she failed to come up to
expectations in the confirmatory trials, she was included in the squad at the
last moment but finished poorly with 53.93m for sixth. She was selected on the
basis of her Inter-Railway meet performance of 58.17m.
No test in April
Amazingly,
NADA did not conduct a single out-of-competition test in athletics in April
last year. That should have been the beginning of a concerted effort to chase
the dopers down in athletics in the build-up towards the Asian Games. From May,
NADA managed 38 tests up to 31 July with 11 of them coming from the relay camp
in the Czech Republic on 29 July and four from Thimphu, Bhutan, where the
middle distance and distance runners were based, a day later.
The
July-end testing, with the Asian Games athletics events scheduled to begin on
28 August, was of very little relevance from an anti-doping perspective. If
NADA was looking for the red-blood-cell-boosting erythropoietin (EPO), it was
ill-timed. No one wanting to use EPO would have done it with 25 days to go
for the competition. It would be of little use. The closer to competition
the better it would be. The fact that Monika Chaudhary, a middle-distance
runner at the Thimphu camp was caught for EPO doping in the retrials in Delhi,
indicated that EPO was much relevant in the Indian scenario.
The
July and August out-of-competition testing by NADA looked a desperate measure,
either to fulfill the requirement of testing all the competitors before the
Games or to boost number of samples. It was a failure.
NADA
went into overdrive in the month of December. It looked to achieve two targets
– increase the overall number of tests, and show somehow that the leading
athletes were indeed tested out of competition during the year, forget for a
moment the Asian Games were over.
From
August to December NADA did 162 out-of-competition tests in athletics with the
last month of the year contributing a whopping 111. Had these 162 tests come in
May-July, there might have been a different tale to tell. One is not suggesting
that Indian athletes were on drugs. Far from it. Often, we are told, our
athletes do not know what doping is, and what the names of the drugs are! This
might be difficult to believe in today’s world of dope-driven athletics.
But
NADA is expected to do its duty all the same. Instead of concentrating on
junior athletes as it did in its out-of-competition testing in May last year
for no apparent reason, NADA should have been expected to focus its attention
on senior campers, at home and abroad. They were left alone.
NADA,
which became functional in January 2009, started its domestic RTP in May 2015.
The RTP took its own time to evolve. At first, there was no clear-cut policy in
adding or excluding athletes in the list. From an original list of 40 track and
field athletes, it grew to a total of 178 sportspersons including 64 athletes
in November 2017.
This
looked good on the eve of the Asian Games and Commonwealth Games year. NADA was
tightening up the screws against dope cheats, one thought. But suddenly, it
whittled the list down to 113, which was 65 less than the previous figure.
Worse, athletics was cut down from 64 to 25.
Why
should there have been extra focus on athletics? Both in 2017 (21 positive
cases) and 2016 (23), athletics had topped the dopers’ charts. Weightlifting
was always a close second if it was not on top among the Olympic disciplines.
Athletes needed closer monitoring and so, too, weightlifting.
NADA,
unfortunately, had an outdated RTP list in May-June, 2018 (whittled down from
64 and updated from Nov 2017) a list that contained many an inactive athlete or
athletes who were no longer leading in their events or those whose inclusion in
the first place defied logic.
It
should not have been too much of a problem to compile a list of athletes who
were prominent and among the medal-contenders in the Asian Games, at the
beginning of 2018, based on the list of campers, NADA’s own RTP at that time
(2017) and current performances, if any available. NADA apparently bungled.
An invitation to dope?
Overconfident
much of the time in its own approach, having a philosophy “let’s not hound the
athletes” and “you can’t test the same athlete over and over again”, NADA left
a huge vacuum in its out-of-competition testing in the lead-up to the Asian
Games that looked an invitation to dope.
Most of
the leading athletes were not tested between 5 March and 25 June, the gap
between the Fed Cup and the inter-State meet, the two competitions that formed
the final selection trials for the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games
respectively. One would have thought they would have been tested at least twice
during the intervening period.
There
is a catchy line that the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) has adopted: “Our
athletes do not dope, they don’t have a chance to dope in camps since testers
arrive every other day.”
AFI
President Adille Sumariwalla on 2 August last year tweeted: “AFI has always
said that in national camp athletes are tested every few days and if they are
stupid to dope, they will get caught. Hence the extra smart ones either don’t
dope or avoid camp.”
Three of those who competed in the Asian Games (quarter-miler
Nirmala Sheoran, distance runner Sanjivani Jadhav and discus thrower Sandeep
Kumari) tested positive after the Games in re-tests ordered by WADA. Two others
who were part of the national camps at some stage or the other, middle distance
runner Jhuma Khatun and shot putter Naveen Chikara also tested positive. Jadhav
has since been handed out a two-year suspension by the IAAF. This May, Asian
Championships gold medallist Marimuthu Gomathi tested positive. AFI
can no longer say athletes in camps do not dope.
As for
the NADA testers whom AFI keeps referring to, they might have spent time in
camps, but did they actually test the elite bunch of athletes there? ‘No’ is
the unfortunate answer. Manjit Singh (800m), Jinson Johnson (1500m), Tejinder
Pal Singh Toor (shot put), Neeraj Chopra (javelin) and Swapna Barman (heptathlon),
the eventual gold medallists in the Asian Games, were not tested
out-of-competition prior to the Games.
Could
NADA have foreseen the gold medals in the Asian Games and concentrated on the
above athletes? No.
Could
it have focused at least on its RTP athletes among them and tested them more?
Yes.
Johnson,
who was in the Bhutan camp but was not tested though a few others were tested
there, along with Chopra and Barman were among the registered pool athletes.
Going by the WADA guidelines and the logic behind whereabouts-based testing,
they should have been subjected to at least three tests during the course of
the year. They were not.
Johnson
was tested out of competition once on 22 December and Chopra twice, on 21
October and 21 December. Barman underwent no out-of-competition test at all
through 2018. In fact, the only in-competition test that she was subjected to
in the year (outside of any test she might have undergone by an international
agency) was at the inter-State meet in Guwahati on 29 June last year, when she
took the title, got selected for Asian Games and went onto win gold in Jakarta
despite an assortment of injuries that she had suffered.
Triple
jumper Arpinder Singh was the lone gold medallist tested out of competition
before the Asian Games. He was tested on 7 March, a day before his competition
in the Fed Cup. He was tested again in-competition. It was illogical but it
prevented a clean sweep of the eventual gold medal winners in Jakarta being
omitted for out-of-competition testing prior to the Games.
Among
the silver medallists at the Asian Games, Dutee Chand (100m, 200m) and Muhammed
Anas (400m) were not tested out of competition by NADA through the year. It
must be noted here that Anas (also shot putter Tejinder Toor) was in the
registered pool of the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) of the International
Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) in 2018 and might have been tested.
That also could have been the reason behind NADA not testing him on 29 July in
Jablonec, Czech Republic, where it tested almost all the campers preparing for
the Asian Games. There was no bar on NADA testing him there, however.
Tests poorly timed
Considering
that the athletics events were starting on 25 August, the tests conducted by
NADA in Europe prior to the Asiad, probably outsourced to another agency, were
not ideally timed. That it did arrange for tests abroad was laudable. More such
‘missions’ especially during a long Europe training programme of athletics, an
integral part of the preparations nowadays, will assure ‘clean’ athletes that
NADA means business.
Long
jumper Neena Varakil (one out-of-competition test in August 2018) and
steeplechaser Sudha Singh (one test in January 2018) were among the silver
medallists tested before the Asian Games. The relay team members, both male and
female, except Muhammed Anas and Arokia Rajiv, were tested at Jablonec, Czech
Republic, on 29 July, 2018.
The two
bronze medallists in the Asian Games, discus thrower Seema Antil Punia, and
middle-distance runner PU Chithra, were not tested out of competition before
the Asiad. Punia was tested once, on 8 March, at the Federation Cup at Patiala,
and it was shown as out of competition which it was not. She underwent no other
tests throughout the year. She competed in only one competition at home in
2018. Nothing has been heard of Antil Punia this year except that she had been
training in Russia. Chithra was tested at Patiala in March and at Guwahati in
June, both in-competition tests.
The
oft-repeated claims of AFI about constant testing at camps become mute when one
asks the number of times each athlete had been tested. “NADA will know that,”
is the stock reply.
Now, we
have numbers.
In a
meagre total of 252 out-of-competition samples in athletics (13.07 percent) out
of 1927 samples across all sports, NADA could not test 78 among 137 campers
(base number from February 2018). That is nearly 57 percent of the athletics campers
went without an out-of-competition test in 2018!
WADA
wants NADA to do more out-of-competition tests than in-competition testing.
That simply looks beyond the capacity of NADA. In 2018, it did 4194 samples in
total in all sports, out of which 1927 (45.94 percent) were out of competition.
There are plans to target more this year, perhaps even double last year’s
count. But the positive results are also steeply climbing. This is where NADA
and the government’s dilemma comes in. More adverse results would mean the
dubious distinction of being among the top-three or top-six as had been the
case in the past.
Will
WADA be tempted to investigate the lack of adequate out-of-competition testing
in India in the crucial months of April-July 2018? It had done an investigation
into the Jamaican anti-doping commission (JADCO) doing just one random test
between March and July in 2012 in the run-up to the London Olympics, as
revealed by the former JADCO Executive Director, Renee Anne-Shirley. Nothing
was known about the outcome of the “extraordinary audit” done by WADA following
the allegation. WADA had done a ‘compliance audit’ of NADA in March 2018.
Should
India go all out and catch more cheats or should NADA apply the brakes and
bring the numbers down? That question will keep coming up for NADA and the
sports ministry, especially when multi-discipline games or World Championships
are round the corner. The recent statement in Parliament by the sports
minister, Kiren Rijiju, that 187 positive cases were reported during the
2018-2019 financial year is an admission that doping goes on unabated in the
country.
