Mumbai: Nipping them in the bud is what the Athletic Federation of India's main agenda is all about. This was announced by Adil Sumariwalla, the president of Athletics Federation of India (AFI) while announcing the 69th State Senior Athletic meet which gets underway in the city from June 25. Sumariwalla, who is also the president of the Maharashtra Athletics Association, called for an overall revamping of the system, stating that the federation with government's backing is all set to clean this in athletics. "NADA officials will be in attendance in all district and state level meets, which will help us nip the menace in the grass root," he said. "We are getting all support from the government and will ensure that things are in place and athletics is on the right track," he added. AFI has made it mandatory that for every state meet there will be dope testing including the ones for the juniors and the funding is being done by the centre.
"We have zero-tolerance to doping and we pushed the government into saying that (in) every-single state meet, there should be a dope control. The problem we face is starting at an early age, junior, state and district-level. It is happening at inter-railway, inter-police and Inter-Services meet. But this menace (of doping) has to stop and we are very serious about it," he added. Accordingly, NADA officials were present during the recently-held Kerala State Athletics meet to monitor the athletes. Sumariwalla also informed that he is pushing for legislation on the criminalisation of doping. Quizzed whether the dope tests would be random, Sumariwalla said that it was within the purview of NADA and AFI cannot have a say on it.
"NADA cannot delay in giving results... as it happened in Gomathi (Marimuthu)'s case, they should have given the results, why did they not give the results and why did we take a tainted athlete to the Asian Championship, made a fool of ourselves and came back. We got one red-tick to get banned, NADA has to answer for a lot," he said. Explaining the rationale behind it, the AFI chief said it is being done to look beyond first, second and third winners. The two-day Maharashtra State Senior Athletics meet will be held at the University Grounds in South Mumbai where 1,116 participants will take part, with Pune district sending the largest contingent.
- FPJ Sports Desk
