Narsingh was ‘victim of sabotage’: Anti-doping panel gives clean chit for Rio

Narsingh Pancham Yadav, whose Rio participation hung by a thread, was cleared of doping charges by an anti-doping disciplinary panel of the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA), which agreed with the grappler’s claim of sabotage.

The NADA panel gave him the benefit of the doubt saying that “the ingestion of the prohibitive substance, in this case methandienone, appeared to be one time.

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“…the panel concludes that the athlete deserves the benefit of Article 10.4 of the anti-doping rules of NADA 2015. As there is no fault and negligence on his part, and he is a victim of sabotage done by a competitor. Therefore, keeping in view the facts and circumstances said above, the panel exonerates the athlete from the charges of violating the anti-doping rules of NADA,” said the three-member panel’s report, which was read out to the media by NADA director general Navin Agarwal.

The summary of the report also states that the estimates for the detected substance found in the urine sample collected on June 25 are substantially reduced in the sample collected in July 5, and that only the long-time metabolite of methandienone was detected in the later sample.

“It is further important to note that the report from the first sample taken on 25 June was not known to the athlete till the collection of second sample on 5th July. Had the athlete being a regular user of the substance in any form, he would have been taking it regularly and the report of sample taken on 5th July would have been positive to the extent of having the main substance,” it said.

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The panel opined it was inconceivable that Narsingh would have got any significant gain from the ‘one-time’ and therefore it strengthened his claim of sabotage. It also junked the NADA counsel’s argument that the athlete had failed to take utmost caution by leaving the drink unattended at the site of practice on the mat and for not opting to change his training centre.

Narsingh’s counsel Vidhuspat Singhania said they were able to successfully plead before the panel that sabotage had taken place.

“We were able to show the court (Sushil Kumar’s high court case) where attempts were made to stop him. We were able to show that a perjury case has been started against a certain gentleman, who had started to stop him and even given a wrong affidavit. We were able to show that there was a life threat, again that is in media knowledge and we were also able to show that on 5th June there was an attempt to sabotage his food. All these show that there was an attempt being made to sabotage his case,” said Singhania.