CHENNAI : A shocking percentage (44.44) of bodybuilders have failed dope tests according to a revised annual report that the National Anti-Doping Agency uploaded on their website on Wednesday.
The initial report, released on Tuesday, had the number of Anti-Doping Rule Violations (ADRVs) revealed till March. The revised list has included the number of Adverse Analytical Findings (AAF) registered over the period (187), a figure that Sports Minister Kiren Rijiju had announced in the Parliament.
An AAF is different from an ADRV in that it only means an athlete’s A sample has tested positive for a banned substance. A positive AAF could yet be cleared if the B sample testing is negative or the athlete is possessing a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE). Simply put, the new figures include cases where a final punishment has not given. The number of ADRVs revealed on Tuesday was 111.
The most noticeable difference in the two reports is the presence of a high number of cases in bodybuilding — 60 of the 135 samples collected for bodybuilders have returned positive (the number of ADRVs in the previous report was 13). There were also multiple new cases in weightlifting with the number spiking from 23 to 41. Eighteen AAFs have been reported in athletics from 1020 samples, 656 of them collected in-competition and 364 collected out of competition. Powerlifting is the only other sport to have the number of AAFs in two figures, with 13 failed tests out of 67 samples collected.