After making online registration compulsory to athletes for entry in competitions last month, The Athletics Federation of India provisionally rejected around one-fourth of the 3,000 applications it received, The Indian Express reported on Sunday.
The apex body expected government-preferred passport or formal photographs in the applications but what they received were strange pictures that included athletes with six packs, funky hairstyles, selfies and many other inappropriate.
The rejected athletes will now have to resend their applications to the AFI with a proper passport picture.
“We had to reject hundreds of applicants for inappropriate pictures. All we sought was a simple passport picture for our registration and we received all kinds of colourful and weird pictures,” AFI communications manager, Divesh Bhal was quoted as saying.
“In some pictures, the athletes’ faces were not visible even. How do they expect us to verify them? I want to humbly request all the athletes to send us proper passport pictures so that they get the id numbers quickly,” he added.
It is learned that shotputter Inderjeet Singh and Sarita Gayakwad, who both won medals at the 2018 Asian Games, were also among those whose applications were provisionally rejected.
Incomplete address and age proof documents were the other reasons for which applications were rejected by the AFI. Last month, AFI made it mandatory for all athletes to register on their website and obtain a unique identification number so that state federations would not have to upload fresh forms before each competition.
“We are the first national sports federation to develop such a system. Now, all they have to do is select players from our system. This will be the norm and no on-the-spot registrations will be entertained,” an official said.
