Inside Dope

If there wasn8217;t already a book and a film of that name, they could make one on Sunita called The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. It8217;s the fate that befalls every Indian sportsman: every official worth his name has a hand in your success but when the chips are down there8217;s no one to share responsibility.

It8217;s symptomatic of a larger, more troubling issue: that the chain of responsibility for drugs-related offences begins and ends with the athlete. Rarely, a coach. Never any official, despite the fact that three Indian athletes have been caught and punished inside one year. Soon after news broke of the Sunita case, the Asian Games Bulletin carried a quote from a Chinese coach saying that 8216;8216;we were all surprised by India8217;s haul in athletics this time. After Sunita tested positive, now we know how they won.8217;8217;

In any other organisation, a similar track record would have seen heads roll; in India8217;s twisted world of sports administration, the only thing they8217;re rolling out is red carpets for the politicians who rule the roost.

So, instead of Indian Olympic Association chief Suresh Kalmadi and Amateur Athletics Federation secretary Lalit Bhanot taking equal responsibility for the lapse, Bhanot said 8216;8216;It is clearly Sunita8217;s fault.8217;8217;

And even as top officials said that the Indian media had jumped the gun in reporting on Sunita8217;s testing positive, Kalmadi, with all the authority at his command, said: 8216;8216;Sunita will not be spared and will be banned for all events hereafter.8217;8217;

No mention of any other jobs on the line. Though Bhanot let the cat out of the bag by revealing, in an article carried in this paper8217;s Centrestage page today, that Sunita ran the 5,000m race 8212; the second, after the 1,500m 8212; against the advice of the top officials. That8217;s because Busan Games officials had already found something suspect in her specimen after the first race.

The contradictions abound. On the one hand, Indian officials insisted they8217;d not received any official intimation of her testing positive for Nandrolone, nor of her being stripped of medals. On the other, they8217;d already begun to treat her like a pariah, guilty till proven innocent; at New Delhi8217;s IGI Airport, she8217;d been bundled out of the back door while her teammates went out the front to be garlanded and heralded.

The closest anyone came to some semblance of a defence was in pretending no one knew anything. As late as Friday evening, sports minister Vikram Verma said he was waiting for the final report. 8216;8216;We have to collect information, finalise a report and then decide on the course of action,8217;8217; he said. Fine, but how about clearing Sunita8217;s name in the meanwhile? And why not simply pick up a phone, call Busan and find out what was going on? It8217;s worth noting that IOA secretary-general Randhir Singh is also the secretary-general of the Olympic Committee of Asia, while Kalmadi is the chief of the Amateur Athletic Association of Asia.

How do they do things abroad? When Jamaica8217;s Merlene Ottey and Sri Lanka8217;s controversial star Susanthika Jayasinghe tested positive for nandrolone, their national federations stood by them and mounted a defence to salvage the reputation of their star athlete. In Cuba, track officials simply refused to suspend 8212; as recommended by the International Amateur Athletics Federation 8212; world record-holding high jumper Javier Sotomayor after he tested positive for cocaine, and the British federation did the same for sprinter Linford Christie.

And it8217;s not that Sunita doesn8217;t have a case. From all accounts, including reports in this paper from our correspondent on the spot, arrangements at the Games were lax. These reports have been corroborated by former star sprinter P T Usha see box, who says the tests couldn8217;t have been foolproof.

Enough ground, then, for Kalmadi to have conducted an enquiry at Busan itself and asked for explanation from Bhanot, his deputy at the AAFI who oversees the functioning of the day-to-day operation. They could have checked Sunita8217;s diet of the past 10 days, her training schedule, her movements within the camp and outside. Anything to establish what went wrong; nothing has been done.

The silence assumes that Sunita acted on her own, yet to put things in perspective one needs to see the role of a coach in Indian athletics. It8217;s a unique relationship, made complex by the fact that there are several levels of coaches. There8217;s the one who discovers an athlete and is responsible for his/her early training; there8217;s the national coach, to whom the athlete will go after reaching the top flight. And there8217;s the foreign coach, usually from a CIS country.

Each of these coaches holds, at various stages, the athlete in his total control. There8217;s a lot at stake: the coach of a winning athlete gets as much reward as does the athlete. Yet he usually escapes the scandal should an athlete be caught for drugs.

Sunita8217;s coach at Busan was Renu Kohli. Not surprisingly, there8217;s been no report so far of any inquiry into Kohli8217;s role. Instead, Bhanot gave her a clean chit, saying 8216;8216;Kohli has nothing to do with Sunita8217;s case.8217;8217;

If Sunita needs help tackling the situation, she can ask weightlifter Kunjarani Devi. Ranked among the top five lifters of the 20th century by the International Weightlifting Federation, she was caught for using a mild stimulant at the Asian Championship in Korea in July 2001. In such cases, an athlete is usually let off with a warning. However, Kunjarani faced a six-month ban.

Here8217;s why: She8217;d been sent to the meet when Sports Minister Uma Bharti personally cleared her trip, after the ad-hoc committee of the Indian Weightlifting Federation had dropped her. Once found guilty, the federation left her to stew on her own, and even told her to pay the 1250 fine from her own pocket.

Harassed and cornered, Kunja received no help from federation officials. She had to plead her own case, draft her own petitions and face the media gangplank on her own. This, despite her status as the top weightlifter and the mildness of her offence.

Not so lucky were fellow weightlifters Satheesha Rai and Madasamy. Rai 8212; who, like Kunja tested positive for a mild stimulant and received a heavy punishment 8212; later said that he could have appealed but was told he had to go to London and pay for his own defence. A Class IV staff with the Railways, the Rs 50,000 cost was too much for him; he preferred to live with ignominy.

After Madasamy was labelled a cheat at Commonwealth Games, his boss Balbir Singh Bhatia expressed ignorance and passed the buck, saying: 8216;8216;We just have no clue how it happened. We just select the lifters and the Sports Authority of India runs the National camp. I don8217;t know what goes on.8217;8217;

That, unfortunately, seems to be the buzzword of our sports administrators.