Don’t Do It, You Dope
While India may not be up to date on masking methods, it is still possible to beat the authorities if you understand the science behind doping. Fitness expert and trainer Firdaus Anklesaria explains, with a caveat that he never advises his clients to dope, the method behind the madness:
Most strength athletes take some form of anabolic steroids to increase their performance during the off season. It’s the way they cycle it that makes sure they don’t get caught. You know there are three drugs that have half lives (the time in which drugs can be detected in your system) of three, seven and 10 days and others that have half lives of six months. So, if you have 11 months to go before your competition, you first use those drugs that have a long half life. Then you use those with a shorter half life. You get clean a couple of months before the tournament. Some amount of strength will drop, but if you have been training properly and the dosages are proper you will still have more endurance and strength than a normal athlete.
A small miscalculation in the time-frame could mean that the drug stays in your system longer and increases your chance of getting caught. Of course, if WADA asks you for your sample during the off season you will be caught and the carefully structured programme is of no use.
“Smart athletes take short-acting drugs. You have strong drugs where a single dose can stay for as long as two weeks in your body and others that go off in a day or two,” says Catlin.
Sports people in India have gotten away with doping until now because India didn’t have an accredited WADA lab to test its athletes.
Sending samples to other countries was be expensive. That’s why most Indian athletes got caught only at international events. All that changed in January 2009 when NADA’s National Dope Testing Laboratory in New Delhi got WADA accreditation. Over 6,600 players have been tested since then and around 242 have been found guilty.
“That’s a very low number for a country like India,” says Catlin. “They should be testing at least 10,000 if not 20,000 athletes a year,” says Catlin who is also the founder of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory, the first anti-doping lab in the US.
Sumariwalla concedes that doping is a huge problem in India, but not at the national level. “It’s huge in the juniors [level]. A lot of coaches at schools and colleges encourage their students to dope to win medals,” says Sumariwalla. That doesn’t explain why so many national level players are
getting caught.
The world over, only 10 to 15 percent athletes are tested for doping. The chances of getting caught are minimal. “Everyone wants to enhance their performance,” says Chandran. “They hope that they don’t get caught.”
The next couple of years will be a tough time for Indian athletes who dope, as WADA and NADA will probably not get their feet off the pedal. This could herald a new era for Indian sport as the ‘system’ gets cleaned. Don’t expect SAI or AFI to help though.
When asked if the AFI can start testing athletes at the school and college level to ensure that the problem is identified early, Sumariwalla says, “It’s just not possible. We don’t have the funds. A national event at that level involves more than 3,000 participants. We can’t test all of them.”
What about the winners then? “If there are 70 events, then there are three winners in each. That’s 210. If there are three national events, we have to test 630 students. It can’t happen.” What about making sure that athletes only buy supplements from authorised chemists outside the National Institute of Sports (NIS) and sports camps? “We can’t regulate from where these guys buy their supplements. We can’t test all the supplements in the shops.”
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