BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court has quashed the four-year suspension of former national basketball player Shashank J Rai by the Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panel (ADDP).
The ADDP had banned Rai (32), the 6.5-foot-tall hoopster from Mangalore, on October 11, 2022, for testing positive for 19-NA (a metabolite of Nandrolone). Rai’s appeal was rejected by the Anti-Doping Appeal Panel on April 16, 2024.
Rai had challenged the ban saying the presence of 19-NA in his sample was not a result of willful ingestion of a performance-enhancing substance, but rather an inadvertent consequence of consuming pork, a staple in the cuisine of his native, coastal Karnataka.
Justice M Nagaprasanna’s order said the penalty imposed by the anti-doping agency was in ignorance of Rai’s assertion.
“The court finds the impugned orders vitiated by non-consideration of vital material, absence of reasoned adjudication and a palpable breach of the principle of fairness,” the court observed.
On February 5, 2022, while participating in a preparatory camp in Bengaluru, intended for India’s elite basketball contingent, the petitioner’s urine sample was collected by the National Anti-Doping Agency and the same was opened and resealed in Delhi. The charges from the petitioner for conducting the Sample-B test were also collected by the Agency. Then the sample was sent to a laboratory in Rome.
The communication established that the Agency conducted some initial procedural tests and then sent the sample to conclude the origin of the 19-NA substance, to find out whether the substance present in the urine is endogenous or exogenous through GC-C-IRMS (Gas Chromatography Combustion isotope ratio mass spectrometry) testing.
The test report for any such test conducted at the National Dope Testing Laboratory was not informed or furnished to the petitioner. The test of both ‘A’ and ‘B’ samples of urine that is conducted by the laboratory at Rome was furnished to the petitioner by the 1st respondent, through a notice.
The notice was not a notice simpliciter, but a notice placing the petitioner under suspension. The lab tests did not indicate the estimated concentration of 19-NA as per the World Anti-Doping Agency Regulations. The petitioner was then issued with the notice of charge on July 13, 2022, wherein the petitioner was charged with violation of Rule 2.1/2.2 of the National Anti-Doping Rules, 2021.