Dope cheats rob athletes of level playing field, warns PT Usha

NEWDELHI: Ahead of the 2019 track and field season, PT Usha called upon all stakeholders to join hands to ensure a fair platform for athletes who are clean of doping. The coming season assumes significance as it features the 2020 Tokyo Olympic qualification events including the IAAF World Relays in May in Yokahama, Japan.

With spate of recent doping cases, the latest involving top 400m runner Nirmala Sheoran, Usha said, if big names are getting caught in retesting of samples by World Anti Doping Agency (WADA), there is something wrong and it needs to be addressed. “I doubt if any agency is probing hard enough to get to the bottom of the issue and find out how athletes are able to come out clean during domestic antidoping tests and test positive when the same samples are retested in a foreign lab,” Usha said during a media interaction on the sidelines of the All India Police Athletics Championships.

Nirmala was among five top athletes whose urine sample was recently retested in Germany by WADA and all five have tested positive for banned substances.

Since 2016 Nirmala, from Haryana, was at the forefront winning almost all major 400m races on the domestic circuit and subsequently qualified for the 2016 Rio Olympics and the 2017 World Athletics Championships.

Usha also raised questions on Nirmala’s gold-medal winning performance at the 2017 Asian Athletics Championships. “I doubt whether it was clean performance,” Usha said.

The Athletics Federation of India (AFI) president Adille Sumariwalla has always maintained that the federation has ‘zero tolerance’ towards doping and has asked NADA to conduct more out-of-competition tests to cleanse the system.

While Usha hit out at the system, Jakarta Asian Games silver medallist in sprints (100m/200m) Dutee Chand pointed to lack of awareness as a main reason for most athletes failing dope tests. The Odisha sprinter, who was also present on the occasion, said regular workshops should be held so that athletes are updated on new substances added to WADA’S list of banned substances. “It’s not happening so far. Quite often athletes take contaminated food supplements and fail dope tests,” she added.