KOCHI: The Athletics Federation of India at its AGM held recently, ruled that it would bar athletes who skip the national camps from competing for the country. The decision has reportedly not gone down well with several athletes who are yet to join the camps and are now contemplating legal action against the diktat.
AFI president Adille Sumariwala told the New Indian Express that athletes not joining camps where the government is “spending crores to push the athletes to the next level so that we can win medals in the Olympics and World Championships” is not a good sign. “Do they honestly believe that their coaches are better than the foreign coaches?” he questioned.
Sumariwala also said non-campers are long suspected to be resorting to doping practices. “There are people who say that we are the doping capital of the world. That is a bad image for Indian athletics and we have to change it.” he said, adding that “the campers are regularly being tested for dope while non-campers are not.”
Some athletes are reportedly contemplating legal action against the diktat, says a New Indian Express report. “How can the AFI ban us from attending selection trials for major events just because we are not in the camp? We are not going to the national camp because we felt the coaches that we have been training with are better than those in the camps. Performance should be the lone basis of selections and even if we perform and we are overlooked, we will take the legal route,” the report quotes a player as saying.
While athletes training at the Sports Authority of India centre in Thiruvananthapuram said they had shared their whereabouts with National Anti Doping Agency (NADA), and are being tested once a month, there were other who have been quoted saying that the national camps should be decentralised.
Russian-born US coach Galina Bukharina, who was part of the Soviet Union 4x100m relay team that won bronze in the 1968 Olympics, is currently heading the national camp.
