Adille Sumariwalla.Age manipulation and doping are the scourge in junior and youth athletics and unless stringent measures are taken, track and field will continue to see so called prodigies get exposed at the senior level, Athletics Federation of India (AFI) president Adille Sumariwalla said on Wednesday.
Sumariwalla was speaking after it came to light on Wednesday that 41 athletes in the Under-18 category had failed age-verification tests at the 16th National Youth Athletics Championships underway in Raipur. The Under-18 event is the qualifying meet for the Asian Youth Championships to be held in Hong Kong next month.
“I have been saying that the two biggest ills of Indian sport are overage athletes and doping. That is why we seem to be doing very well in the juniors but none of these athletes seem to be doing anything at the senior level because the athlete instead of being 18 years old is actually 22 or 23,” Sumariwalla told The Indian Express.
An age verification committee of the AFI will meet later this month to decide on the quantum of punishment. Sumariwala said that any ban will need the ‘okay’ of the executive committee.
Among the prominent junior athletes found to have manipulated his age was Delhi sprinter Nisar Ahmed, a multiple gold medallist at the Khelo India games and one who was tipped to be the ‘next big thing’ in Indian athletics.
Sumariwalla said that the AFI was not in the business of targetting a particular athlete but was only putting safeguards in place to ensure that the sport is clean and a level-playing field is maintained.
The combination of age manipulation and use of performance-enhancing drugs hurt the sport but earn an athlete puffery before performances stagnate when he or she graduates to the senior level, the AFI president added.
“Also on top of that (age falsification) the athlete would have taken some forbidden substance and will be running world-class timings or senior timings. But when the athletes comes to the senior level, the (dope) testing increases because the athlete is in the camp. Now when all this happens the performance starts going down, even with the best of training under foreign coaches the athlete is just about able to maintain that performance or do fractionally better. This is because he or she has already reached his peak. This is the biggest problem we have.”
The age-verification tests at the youth championships were conducted by AFI’s medical committee chairman Dr Arun Mendiratta. Competition secretary K Nitin Arya revised results of 20 events in which those who had falsified their age had participated in.
Sumariwalla, a council member of the IAAF, the international athletics body, advocated the need to criminalise doping which would also mean that coaches of junior athletes who failed dope tests could potentially be arrested and put behind bars.
“I was the first person to push for criminalisation of doping because if the junior athletes are doping, their coaches should go to jail. It may be draconian but many countries in the world have adopted criminalisation of doping and they have passed it in their respective parliament, including in Germany. If there is criminalisation of doping then coaches will know that they could go to jail,” Sumariwalla said.
The sports ministry is pushing for a national anti-doping act which will make doping a criminal offence in India and a supplier could face up to four years in jail.
Countries including France, Kenya, Italy, Spain and Germany have put in place criminal sanctions for sports-related doping. In 2017 Russia too did the same. Lawmakers in the United States introduced a bill in the House, in June last year, which would target manufacturers and distributors of performance-enhancing drugs.
NADA should test more
However, anti-doping watchdogs needs to do more in India, especially at the junior level, the AFI president added.
“NADA (National Anti-Doping Agency) needs to do far more testing and we are not happy (about the current numbers). I think they need to double and triple the amount of testing and more so at the junior level because once the athletes know that they can’t do it at the junior level, then they don’t get used to taking banned substances. Today even the Sports Authority of India is not taking enough action against these coaches whose athletes are caught. These coaches should be suspended immediately. It is not happening.”
