NADA begins Athlete Biological Passport scheme for Olympians
NEW DELHI: The National AntiDoping Agency has started an ambitious Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) programme which will cover Olympic bound sportspersons for now before extending to other elite, national and state level athletes, its Director General Navin Agarwal said on Tuesday.
ABP is the monitoring of selected biological parameters over time that may indirectly reveal effects of doping on the body. This allows anti-doping agencies to generate individual profiles for each athlete through which fluctuations, that may indicate the use of performanceenhancing drugs or methods, would be apparent.
“We have begun an Athlete Biological Passport programme by using which we can make a longitudinal study of several biological parameters of an athlete’s body. By using ABP we can know doping by an athlete at any time so that we can hand punishments,” Agarwal said. “When an athlete dopes, the parameters change. Some parameters of the body are such that the blood and urine samples can detect the changes later on as the changes remain for a long time.”
The programme was devised by anti-doping agencies as a new detection strategy to combat emerging threats arising out of the use of new or modified substances or designer drugs by athletes. Agarwal said ABP was introduced to ensure that no athlete is caught doping during the Tokyo Olympics.
“We are preparing the ABP of all those Tokyo bound athletes so that nobody is caught for doping there. Moreover, that (ABP) will give the facility to them so that there is no need to do another testing in Tokyo. The Olympics is coming up and we have to ensure that no Indian athlete is caught in the dope net during the Olympics and or whosoever uses prohibited drug before the Olympics is caught before that (Olympics).”