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Journalism of Courage
For all the talk about cracking down on doping, Indian sports officials are still reluctant to make the system transparent. While dope testing goes on, under pressure from international bodies, and people are caught in the net, secrecy seems to be the name of the game.
Documents in the possession of The Sunday Express show that there have been 10 fresh cases of sportspersons testing positive between the Hyderabad National Games in December and March 2003, including four in lifting, three in athletics, two in boxing and one in football.
| Lifting the veil | |
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The weightlifting junior nationals in Chennai in January probably saw doping at its most rampant: 23 lifters were caught, virtually the entire second rung of India’s best. They included new meet record holders and gold, silver and bronze medal winners. Of these, only the case of Shailaja, a triple gold medallist at the Manchester Commonwealth Games, was made public after she was dropped from the national coaching camp in Patiala on testing positive. Below, for the first time, the full list of offenders — |
These revelations follow the admissions in the past few weeks that 21 athletes tested positive at the last National Games and 23 weightlifters at the subsequent junior nationals.
Three of the new cases — a footballer and two boxers — were caught not at events but at training camps, a significant point as rampant doping at camps has always been suspected but rarely proved.
However, these names have been kept under wraps, reminiscent of the Seema Antil case. In that instance, news of the discus thrower testing positive at a world junior meet was kept secret by the Amateur Athletics Federation of India (AAFI) for several months and came to light only after the international body imposed a ban on her.
Incidentally, the punishment for a doping offence at a camp is the same as that at a competitive event. In fact, possession of drugs is now deemed an offence.
That doesn’t seem to have dissuaded boxer D Bhagya Rajan, though; he first tested positive at the Hyderabad Games and, given that this is his second offence, faces a life ban. The other boxer caught with him at the camp in Patiala in February is S Raju.
The footballer caught is Punjab’s Harbinder Singh, who tested positive during a national camp in January. He is the second footballer to be caught in the space of a few months, after East Bengal defender Arun Malhotra, who tested positive at the pre-Asiad camp last September. Malhotra — whose offence was made public at the time — was given a 60-day suspension and returned to play for East Bengal in the season just concluded.
Three track and field athletes caught at the Shimoga junior nationals in January are triple jumper Pushpender Yadav (who set a meet record), Avtar Singh and P Raju.
The documents show that the doping cloud hasn’t lifted over weightlifting: four lifters tested positive at the national meet in Lucknow in March, including G Munivel, Arun Bhardwaj and Gurpreet Singh.
So bad is the state of the sport that the Weightlifting Federation of India was forced to pull out of the upcoming World Junior meet in Mexico rather than risk one of the team-members being caught there. As it is, it would be without 23 of its best lifters, who’d tested positive at the Junior Nationals in Chennai.
