CHENNAI: Weightlifting has once again taken the top spot in India’s doping charts, according to the annual report for 2018-19 released by the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) on its website on Tuesday.
The report, which took into the account the period between April 2018 and March 2019, reveals that 23 lifters tested positive during this time, eight more than athletics, which occupies second place with 15 Anti-Doping Rule Violations (ADRVs). It needs to be noted that weightlifting’s 23 cases came from 357 collected samples — nearly one in 15 positive tests — while 1020 samples were taken from athletes.
This figure will likely go up, as the numbers in the NADA report are not final. While Sports Minister Kiren Rijiju had said in the parliament that 187 tests out of 4348 samples returned positive, the NADA report only mentions 111 positive cases. “The minister gave the updated figures,” said NADA DG Navin Agarwal. “The report takes into account results revealed before March 2019. More (of the 4348 samples collected) came out after that.”
It is mentioned elsewhere on the NADA website that 187 athletes had failed dope tests. A host of weightlifting and bodybuilding cases were publicised in NADA’s June and July newsletters. The stats for the latter sport is worrying — one in 10 bodybuilders tested were found to have doped. Powerlifting has the highest such ratio with nearly one in eight failing tests. Cases were also there in unlikely events like tennis and motorsports, the latter involving a racer with a two-wheeler series in 2018.
More than 10 per cent of all tests conducted were done in the build-up to the Asian Games. “In the run-up to the Asian Games held in August 2018, NADA tested as many as 498 Indian athletes, which was the largest testing conducted by NADA before any international games. Out of these, 54 athletes who were training abroad in preparation for the Asian Games, were tested by NADA in various countries including Czech Republic, Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Thailand and Bhutan,” the report says.
One sport missing from the report is cricket. While the samples are tested at the National Dope Testing Laboratory, the result management is not done by NADA but by the BCCI themselves. With the report coming out on the same day as the news of three cricketers failing tests, there will now be a renewed focus on the sport coming under NADA’s ambit.