Sports Authority of India Director General Injeti Srinivas on Saturday made it clear that no Rio Olympics-bound hockey player was issued notice by the National Anti-Doping Agency for ‘whereabouts’ filing failure as has been reported in a section of the media.
Srinivas, who accompanied new sports minister Vijay Goel to inspect the facilities at the SAI Centre in Bengaluru, disclosed that two “individual athletes” were issued notices for not updating their ‘whereabouts’ status to the NADA.
“There was a case of two athletes who had not updated their whereabouts status with NADA. They later explained the reason for their difficulties to update their whereabouts on NADA website. NADA was satisfied and therefore this matter is behind us,” Srinivas told reporters.
“No hockey player was involved. They are individual athletes,” he added.
A section of the media had reported that three Rio-bound Olympians have been issued show-cause notices by the NADA for ‘whereabouts’ failure and two out of them were senior men hockey players.
NADA Director General Navin Agarwal had also told PTI that a few sportspersons had committed ‘whereabouts’ failures but all the Rio Olympics-bound contingent have undergone tests and were dope free.
Sportspersons included in the reserve testing pool need to provide their ‘whereabouts’ on a quarterly basis and a 60-minute time slot between 6am and 11pm each day to be available for testing at a specific location for out-of-competition testing.
Three such ‘whereabouts’ failures is treated as a doping violation.
