Kamal Ghorui
Many years, India’s anti-doping rule violations are the worst in the world. Now, the international organisation to combat doping has downgraded Athletics Federation of India, to the highest-risk, Category A bracket. Readers will be confused.
Because they are used to seeing other countries that make such headlines, hold bagfuls of top-tier medals. Not India. At the Paris Olympics, for example, it finished 71st, with ‘nada’ gold. This riddle, however, is easily explained. The bulk of violations are at the developmental, rather than elite level. Not in international championships but state and national tourneys, university competitions, local meets. The issue persists predominantly at the grassroots.
If anyone is taking comfort in the absence of a states-ponsored programme designed to win Olympic glory, like Russia’s was, it’s cold comfort. India’s best athletes may not be abusing drugs to win world titles, but lower-tier ones are downing them plentifully, to grab things far more modest. Such as cash awards, police recruitment, railway positions. These athletes aren’t trying to beat a Kenyan or a German, just the person next to them at a district, state, national meet. This doping is a socioeconomic phenomenon, playing out at the bottom of the sporting pyramid.
For top athletes, India’s downgrade will mean more stringent testing than their competitors. The real need for this, though, is at lower levels of the pyramid. It needs much better staffing of National Anti-Doping Agency. Currently, drug control officers leave local competitions mostly unregulated. Another major enforcement gap is that while athletes (often young, poor, and uneducated about what they’re being given) absorb all the career-ending bans, coaches keep facilitating doping with very little personal risk.
Only last Dec did Nada, for the first time, suspend (provisionally) a national-level athletics coach, for “trafficking or attempted trafficking of prohibited substances”. Finally, sport is not played outside of society. Grassroots doping is only mirroring more widespread grassroots corruption – and desperation.
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