WADA Report: NADA records 71 positive tests but less samples collected

New Delhi: Athletics continued to be India’s achilles’ heel in its anti-doping campaign, accounting for 21 of the 71 positive tests recorded by the National Anti-Doping Agency in the last one year, according to the latest WADA report.

According to the report, NADA tested 3174 urine and blood samples during the last year which showed 71 Adverse Analytical Finding (AAF), which indicates the number of positive tests.

There were 9 Atypical Findings (ATF), samples that were found suspicious and possibly required further investigations, as per the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

While the number of dope cheats has reduced from 110 in 2015 to 71 in 2017, it needs to be factored in that NADA tested a bigger pool of 4734 players back then.

A break up of the NADA testing reveals that in athletics, 815 Tests were conducted in 2017 with 502 being In-Competition (IC) and 229 being OOC (Out Of Competition). Of these 84 were blood samples.

The second highest number of dope offenders came from Power Lifting, which made up for 14 positive tests out of the 50 IC samples collected.

Weightlifters also predictably remained in the top bracket of dope offenders with 11 positive tests out of 359 collected samples.

The most startling revelation is the sport of Bodybuilding where NADA collected only 18 samples and 9 turned out to be positive.

Popular sports like football and hockey had one positive report each from the 318 and 156 samples respectively.

Wrestling had four dope cheats among the 199 tested. Volleyball and Judo had two positive reports each while boxing had four such results.

Interestingly, Indian boxers had the highest number of Out Of Competition (OOC) testing — 270 which is more than always-under-the-scanner athletics (229). 

The next highest OOF is that of weightlifting with 177 Tests.