India occupies the second place in the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) much-delayed 2020 Anti-Doping Rule Violation (ADRV) Report released on Tuesday. It is India’s worst rank ever, though it has been among the top seven in the list of nations with the most ADRVs – some call it the Hall of Shame – each year since 2013.
The depressing news comes at a time when India may have intensified the war against doping with an improved testing strategy and with more testing than in the previous years after an inexplicable slowdown in 2016. We shall turn our attention to the brighter side, but only after we have considered the 2020 list.
With 59 ADRVs, including four non-analytical ADRVs, India is second only to Russia’s 135 and ahead of United States of America (57), Italy (47) and Ukraine (39) in the top five during the year that saw fewer samples being collected because the Covid-19 pandemic shook the entire world, not just sport at all levels.
It cannot be understated that the United States of America returned the most AAFs in 2020, with as many as 136 of the 7757 samples collected testing positive for prohibited substances. But with 19 cases disposed of on medical grounds and a whopping 81 cases being declared as having no case to answer, the USADA was able to bring the ADRVs down to just 36.
WADA lists the cases closed at the results-management level, excluding the Therapeutic Use Exemption cases, under the heading: No case to answer. These include authorised routes of administration for glucocorticosteroids, departures from International Standards; or cases outside of WADA’s jurisdiction (including non-WADA Code signatories).
To return to the India story, four disciplines of Weightlifting (15 ADRVs), Athletics (12), Kabaddi, and Powerlifting (7 each) contribute nearly 70 percent of the total ADRVs. As many as 15 disciplines showed up in the 55 ADRVs resulting from laboratory findings, while Athletics (3) and Judo (1) account for the four non-analytical ADRVs.
The other disciplines that contributed to the tally of 59 Indian ADRVs included Wrestling (6), Boxing (3) and Basketball, Cricket, Fencing, Football, Judo, Shooting, Taekwondo, Volleyball and Wushu (1 each).
Of course, it is a matter of concern that the 55 AAFs were from 1186 samples NADA collected before the slowdown owing to the pandemic. These ADRVs form a whopping 4.64 per cent of the samples collected – the highest percentage among all Anti-Doping Organisations which collected at least 150 samples in 2020.
The legal team of the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) did well to succeed in convincing Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panels (ADDP) that the Adverse Analytical Findings (AAF) on each of the 55 samples were the result of ADRVs and that there were no cases pending from the year 2020.
India’s 55 ADRVs in 2020 were known when Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports Anurag Singh Thakur shared statistics in response to a question in the Rajya Sabha in February last. With 123 AAFs in 2022 indicating a sharp decline in the percentage of samples testing positive for banned substances (see table below), there is hope that India is turning the corner.
| India’s War Against Doping 2013-2022 | ||||||||
| Year | Rank | Samples | AAFs | % AAF | ADRVs | % ADRV | ||
| 2013 | 3 | 4274 | 93 | 2.18 | 90 | 2.11 | ||
| 2014 | 3 | 4340 | 99 | 2.28 | 96 | 2.21 | ||
| 2015 | 3 | 5162 | 110 | 2.13 | 117 | 2.27 | ||
| 2016 | 6 | 2831 | 73 | 2.58 | 69 | 2.44 | ||
| 2017 | 7 | 3174 | 71 | 2.24 | 57 | 1.80 | ||
| 2018 | 4 | 3979 | 104 | 2.61 | 107 | 2.69 | ||
| 2019 | 3 | 4004 | 225 | 5.62 | 152 | 3.80 | ||
| 2020 | 2 | 1186 | 55 | 4.64 | 55 | 4.64 | ||
| 2021 | 1794 | 42 | 2.34 | |||||
| 2022 | 4260 | 123 | 2.89 | |||||
| Source: 2013-2020 WADA Annual ADRV reports;
2021 and 2022, Rajya Sabha Q&A, February 9, 2023 |
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You will notice that in some years, the number of ADRVs are higher than the AAFs for the respective year. That could be result of a backlog of pending cases from the earlier year/s. For instance, WADA 2019 ADRV Report reveals that as many as 89 cases were pending in India and some of these could have been resolved in 2020.
This is also the reason that the NADA website shows more than 90 instances of athletes’ ineligibility period beginning in 2020, while only 55 related to the AAFs that year, as shown in the latest ADRV Report. It also means that 2019 was worse than revealed in the WADA ADRV Report for that year, with more samples showing up positive than at any time in NADA’s history.
India will, however, have to deal with the shame of having risen to the second spot in the annual list behind Russia. And at the same time, continue the work on the testing front with NADA not taking its eyes off potential offenders, with some smart out-of-competition testing to prevent the AAF graph from rising past the 3 per cent mark, if not bring it down below the 2 per cent mark.