For the third year in a row, India is ranked third in the world in a doping violation report published by World Anti-Doping Agency for 2015. In that period, India has had 117 athletes being punished after testing positive for banned substances, a sharp increase from the previous years.
The list was topped by Russia, which has been under the WADA scanner since state-sponsored doping scandal was reveal last year, with 176 cases. Italy was second with 129, reported PTI. India is in the same position as in the reports of 2013 and 2014.
However, a cause of concern for India is the rise in the number of dope offenders. India had 91 and 96 Anti-doping Rule Violations (ADRVs) in 2013 and 2014 respectively. All the dope violations by the Indians came from urine samples.
Of the 117 Indian dope offenders, two are non-analytical ADRVs, which means cases that do not involve detection of a prohibited substance by a WADA-accredited laboratory but instances like failure to submit to a test, possession, use or trafficking of a prohibited substance by athletes and support personnel, continued the report.
Out of the other 115, 78 are committed by male athletes while 37 are by female. Among individual sports, weightlifting had the highest number of doping cases with 56 lifters in the list (32 male and 24 female).
Athletics was the second highest with 14 men and seven women athletes punished, followed by boxing (8), wrestling (8), cycling (4), kabaddi (4), aquatics (3), powerlifting (3), judo (2), wushu (2), rowing, bodybuilding (1), hockey (1), football (1) and street and ball hockey (1).
Worldwide, the dope offenders belong to 80 sports/disciplines and 121 nationalities. Globally, bodybuilding overtook athletics with the highest number of dope cheats with 270 such cases. Athletics is second at 242, followed by weightlifting (239), cycling (200), powerlifting (110), football (108), rugby union (80), boxing (66), wrestling (57) and basketball (39).
The worldwide figure also show a spike in punished doping cases and WADA said it was in line with the anti-doping movement’s increased focus on investigations, intelligence gathering and whistleblowing.
“What is particularly striking about this 2015 ADRVs Report is: we are beginning to see the first signs of the impact of the revised Code, in particular a significant increase in intelligence-based anti-doping rule violations, an area of greater focus for the Agency as we strengthen our investigations and intelligence-gathering capacity,” said WADA President Sir Craig Reedie.