Monday, Oct 21, 2002
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Sports : General
By Our Special Correspondent
Sunita Rani's gold has gone out of India's tally at the official website of the Asian Games. To put it in a different way, for the benefit of those who believe in hair-splitting, India's gold tally is one less than what it was credited with on the closing day of the Games. India, now with 10 gold medals, has slipped to the eighth position behind Chinese Taipei, which also has 10 golds but a larger number of silver and bronze. This in itself is no news. It was always expected that it would be so. In fact it was reported from Busan, too. Yet, at the felicitation function that the Union Sports Minister, Mr. Vikram Verma hosted last Thursday, for some of the medal winners, the Chef de Mission of the Indian contingent, Mr. Jagdish Tytler, insisted that there was no change in India's medals tally. And to buttress his argument he flaunted a print-out of the tally from the official website. What the official website showed then had very little relevance just as it has very little relevance now. For, `officially', the OCA is not in receipt of the Medical Commission report or recommendation on Sunita Rani's positive test even now and as such has not taken any `official' action to strip her of the medals. But that is only a formality. We can go on arguing about a test scheduled in Seoul on October 25, just as the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) President, Mr. Suresh Kalmadi, had been doing for the benefit of the media and the public. Even the Sports Minister was quoted as saying in Bhopal on Saturday that Sunita was yet to be stripped of the medals and a final test report was awaited.That will not bring the gold medal (or the bronze) back. Just two positive tests (`A' and `B' samples) after one race would be sufficient to strip an athlete of all the medals after the initial date. Why should the official website change the medals tally even as the Indian officials are insisting that a `B' sample test is scheduled for October 25? The only explanation could be that the `B' sample, for the 1500m race, has already been tested and found positive, as reported by international agencies, but there is one more `B' sample that is pending, that collected after Sunita's bronze in the 5000 metres. The website has also carried out the changes in the athletics results following Sunita's positive tests, upgrading Kyrgyzstan's Tatiana Borisova to the gold, Japan's Yoshiko Ichikawa to the silver and India's Madhuri Singh to the bronze in the 1500 metres and bringing in Ishikawa to the bronze status from the fourth position in the 5000 metres. The formalities continue to remain, but it is time the Indian officials realised the futility of clinging onto hair-splitting technicalities. Instead, they have to think about what the future course of action could be. Not against Sunita, for, that is not strictly within the purview of either the IOA, SAI or the Sports Ministry, but on the doping front. Unless, of course the Ministry and the SAI are planning something different from what the international sports bodies have prescribed. The smug `all-is-well' attitude is bound to be counter-productive in the longer run, especially after two successive games, the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games, have returned positive dope tests from Indian competitors. Nor will there be any takers for the sob story regarding the media having conducted a trial and punished the athlete and the officialdom even before the charges were framed. As for Sunita, whom the media has been hounding the past few days, the wait now should be for the OCA to initiate action by informing the IOA the Asian Athletics Association (AAA) and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). The IOA in turn has to inform the Amateur Athletic Federation of India (AAFI) which will be forced to suspend her as the first step. In case it does not, then the IAAF might step in and suspend her. The athlete has the right to request a hearing before a tribunal set up by the federation. If the athlete fails to seek a hearing within 28 days of the notice about a doping offence he or she would be deemed to have waived such a right to a hearing. Once a doping offence is established after the hearing, the National federation will confirm the ineligibility of the athlete. In case it fails to do so, then the IAAF itself will declare the athlete ineligible for specific periods depending on the type of substances that were found in the dope test. Nandrolone positives attract a two-year suspension. In case the federation re-instates the athlete after the hearing, the IAAF Medical Commission will have the right to contest that decision before an arbitration panel if it thinks that an erroneous decision had been arrived at. There is a grey area that pertains to the hearings. It is not clear whether the OCA hearings, which according to all accounts were rather peremptory, would be considered as the final hearing or whether Sunita will have the right to present her arguments before an AAFI panel. It is also not clear whether at the end of a prolonged battle if the AAFI and the IAAF decide to re-instate Sunita, even after the OCA has taken the medals away, what the final decision of the OCA would be. The road ahead is long for Sunita and the AAFI. The parties involved would fish out many a procedural lacuna. If the AAFI has projected a `neutral' image so far, it has to be admitted that the National federation cannot be the jury and the defence lawyer at the same time, though from behind the scenes every National federation would be expected to work in favour of its athletes. The Seema Antil case, for a pseudoephedrine violation, that attracted only a warning and stripping of the gold medal she won at a World junior championship, took almost a year to resolve.
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