Dr. P S M Chandran / Janaury 20, 2016
Marion Jones to Maria Sharapova. A decade has separated the two pin up girls of world sports. But their cries remain the same. “I have done it. It was a mistake. I beg your pardon.”
Sports are synonymous with fair play. No doubt, cheats cannot be given the pride of place in sports. Still in sports the line between cheating and foul play is hazy. Sports need performers beyond human endeavor. But the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) has put a rider on that concept; no medications to enhance the health and fitness of athletes. It is a different matter that when the health & fitness is enhanced, the performance of the athlete is bound to go up. Athletes’ career will be in jeopardy if they don’t follow WADA dictum.
Maria Sharapova, by her own statement was taking a substance called ‘Meldonium’ to better her health starting as a teenager. No one had any objection to that for a decade. Came 2016 Australian open and she continued to take that substance. Today she is caught in the whirl pool of doping as on January 1st, 2016 WADA included Meldonium in its 2016 revised list of banned substances. No one is insane to believe that Sharapova, with everything at stake has taken the substance with the intension of cheating especially when she was fully aware that there was drug testing at the Australian Open. She has confessed that she had failed to keep a tag on all medications, hundreds of them banned by WADA.
Even her support staff which included doctors and nutritionists failed to do that. With the result she now got stamped by WADA as a drug cheat at the fag end of her illustrious career. But does Maria Sharapova really deserve this tag of a cheat? She has been sporting enough to come in front and accept that it was an oversight that she failed to keep a tag on updated list of medications banned by WADA.
Meldonium, the substance found to have been used by Sharapova does not figure in the pharmacopeia of many countries and is not a routine prescription drug. Its properties are unknown. There are unconfirmed reports that it is used to treat irregular heartbeats. WADA which included the drug in its 2016 list of prohibited substances claims that it is has got conclusive evidence to show that Meldonium is a metabolic modulator and hence it is a performance enhancing drug for sports. If that is so, let WADA come out in the open and place its findings before the scientific community for scrutiny. The medical and scientific community would like to know when and where WADA had carried out the study on Meldonium and who were the subjects on whom the study was conducted and also which third party had evaluated the results of their study. Like the world asking questions to Maria Sharapova, let questions be directed to WADA too. WADA needs to be transparent in its scientific research while chasing athletes to catch them with their pants down on doping.
In a similar incidence, last year the Court of Arbitration for Sports (CAS) paved the way to make the sports governing bodies more accountable on doping control issue. Setting aside the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ban on Indian athlete Dutee Chand, CAS has asked the IAAF to bring forward indisputable scientific evidence through research within two years to show that the hormone Androgen can indeed enhance sports performance as claimed by IAAF. As per WADA code it is inevitable that Maria Sharapova will have to face sanctions which may extend from a warning to a 4 year ban. Her tennis career is likely to end with such sanctions. But WADA too has to be made accountable for their finding which says that the substance Meldonium abused by Sharapova is a performance enhancing one. They may be asked to present their findings before the medical fraternity which in turn be asked to scrutinise the evidence put forward by WADA. Maria Sharapova’s case along with CAS’s directions on Dutee Chand’s case should be taken as trend setter to review the attitude & policies of WADA before WADA cause complete destruction to the world sports in the guise of doping control. Drug control in sports is justified but it should not be an obsession for sports governing bodies.
Considering the fact that WADA’s present hard line approach to performance enhancement has only tarnished the image of world sports, the International Olympic Committee may constitute a Committee of experts drawn from WHO & International Medical Association, sports scientists as well as sportspersons for a review. It is ironical that 50% of WADA’s budget is contributed by the IOC & the remaining 50% by the national governments of the world but WADA is accountable to none. Incidentally India also contributes Rs 60 lakhs per year. In return WADA does not pay a penny for our anti doping programmes. Where is the fair play here?
Dr. P S M Chandran is the President of Indian Federation of Sports Medicine.
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