Indian sportspersons take drugs because they have gotten away with it so far. But now the authorities are playing catch up
It’s a small clinic in the heart of Mumbai and not very hard to find. There are no confusing bylanes to traverse. Ask anyone in the area where the sports doctor is and you’ll be pointed to his house that doubles up as his clinic. He says he graduated as a doctor from a Mumbai college in the 1990s. Today, he calls himself a fitness and health expert. His speciality: Giving ‘booster’ shots to athletes, bodybuilders, weightlifters, actors and models. “National level athletes come to me, some on their own, others are sent by their coaches. They want steroids and I inject them,” says the doctor who does not wish to be named. One cycle lasts between four and 13 weeks and costs start from Rs. 7,000 a cycle. It’s that easy to get a steroid shot in Mumbai. Stimulants, beta-blockers, anabolic steroids, diuretics, you name it and you can have it.
Doping is the worst kept secret in Indian sports. Badminton ace Saina Nehwal says she knows athletes that dope. Dr. P.S.M. Chandran, former director of medicine at Sports Authority of India (SAI) says it’s been part of the system for close to two decades now. Dr. Najib Nandi, a former medical officer at SAI, was forced to go on leave without pay in 2009 after he filed an RTI (Right to Information) to expose organised doping in SAI.
If Asian Games and Commonwealth Games gold medallists Ashwini Akkunji, Mandeep Kaur and Sini Jose hadn’t been caught, doping would have made news for a couple of days and then died down. The athletes claimed innocence and blamed it on contaminated food supplements that athletics coach Yuri Orgodnik gave them.
Chandran rubbishes their claims, “Any top class athlete who’s been caught doping and says he or she doesn’t know is lying. And if the authorities say they don’t know about it, they are lying as well.”
But the case of Akkunji and co. may not be that simple. Adille Sumariwalla, working president of the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) is positive that they are innocent. He blames the adulterated medical trade. “I don’t believe the girls have taken anything. It is the stuff in the market that is contaminated. These girls are under the WADA [World Anti Doping Agency] whereabouts clause [WADA requires athletes to keep them updated about their whereabouts at all times]. It doesn’t make any sense for them to do something like this.”
Indian athletes have no choice but to take supplements. The health pack provided by SAI is a joke. Funds and supplements provided by SAI often run out and athletes have to buy their own supplements.
If any of the supplements have steroids in them, it’s difficult for an athlete to know since they may be under a different name considering WADA’s list of banned substances runs into hundreds. Though WADA and NADA (National Anti Doping Agency) publish the list on their Web sites, not many athletes have access to the Internet.
The only way to lay this case to rest is to test the supplements from the same batch as well as the same supplier they were purchased from. The B samples of Kaur, Jose, Jauna Murmu and Tiana Mary Thomas tested positive on July 8. If the girls lose their appeal, they’ll receive a two-year ban considering it is their first offence.
“Such cases used to be common 10 to 15 years ago in the US. Not anymore,” says Dr. Don Catlin, founder of Los Angeles-based NGO Anti-Doping Research and Professor Emeritus of molecular and medical pharmacology at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. “Usually these supplements are manufactured in China,” he says.
Obsolete Methods
Doping is not a new trend. Athletes have been using various forms of dope for centuries. From opium and alcohol to blood doping and gene doping, athletes have always tried to get an edge over their rivals. Canadian Ben Johnson and Americans Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery are some of the famous names who have been stripped of their titles after they tested positive.
But athletes and coaches in the West and China are constantly on the lookout for better ways to game the system, say Indian players and coaches. Arjuna awardee Ashwini Nachappa says, “There are dedicated research labs for masking agents in these countries.” Masking agents are chemicals that hide the presence of banned substances in the body. “It is quite difficult to detect masking agents as new ones keep coming into the market and obviously we are not told about them. The most common drug that athletes use is different forms of testosterone and there are a lot of ways to camouflage it,” says Catlin.
(This story appears in the 29 July, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)