The Asian Age

BCCI unlikely to cave in to Nada pressure

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New Delhi, Oct. 29: The BCCI brass will soon have ameeting to chalk out a plan to deal with mounting pressure from the National Anti-Doping Agency (Nada) that wants Virat Kohli and Co under its ambit.

There is a Committee of Administra­tors (COA) meeting in Mumbai on November 3, where the issue will come up for discussion but, as of now, the Indian cricket’s governing body is unlikely to budge from its current stand.

The top leadership of BCCI believes that trying to get a Virat Kohli or Mahendra Singh Dhoni sign the ‘whereabout­s clause’ is one of the main reasons behind Nada wanting BCCI to come under its wing.

Whereabout­s are informatio­n provided by a limited number of top elite athletes about their location to the Internatio­nal Sport Federation (IF) or National Anti-Doping Organizati­on (Nada in this case), which include them in their respective registered testing pool as part of these top elite athletes’ anti-doping responsibi­lities.

The BCCI had hired Sweden’s Internatio­nal Drug Testing Management (IDTM) for testing work and is likely to continue with it.

With reports emerging that Nada is likely to send its Doping Control Officers (DCO) during the domestic tournament­s and if BCCI doesn’t co-operate, will take legal route, but senior board officials are wondering whether that would be as easy as top government officials are making it out to be.

The top Indian cricketers, who are always in the spotlight, have time and again protested that signing the whereabout­s clause would lead to infringeme­nt of privacy.

“BCCI is not a signatory to Nada code and therefore under no compulsion to release our cricketers for the dope test. We are under ICC, which is Wada compliant. At ICC events, our cricketers are tested by Wada. But since we are not a National Sports Federation (NSF), we are under no obligation to become Nada signatory,” a senior BCCI official, privy to the developmen­t told PTI on Sunday.

The official then said: “Testimony to our transparen­t process is the latest Wada report where 153 of our cricketers were tested ‘In Competitio­n’ and ‘Out of Competitio­n’ and there was only one dope positive result.”

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