Kamalpreet Kaur doping: AIU bans thrower for 3 years

Tokyo Olympic discus thrower Kamalpreet Kaur, who tested positive for a prohibited substance on March 7, has been handed a three-year doping ban, the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) announced on Wednesday.

Among a series of doping cases involving Indian athletes this season, the 26-year-old’s was the most high profile, apart from that of Tokyo Olympics javelin thrower Shivpal Singh. Last week, Shivpal was handed a four-year ban by the National Anti Doping Agency’s (NADA) anti-doping disciplinary panel.

Kamalpreet’s sample was taken by AIU, the international anti-doping watchdog. She and Tokyo Olympic gold medallist Neeraj Chopra were the only two Indians in the Registered Testing Pool of World Athletics. Kaur had made headlines with her performance in the lead up to the Olympics and carried her sensational form to Tokyo where she qualified for the final (64m) and finished an impressive sixth (63.70m). She set the national record (66.69m) last year.

Giving details, AIU said that Kamalpreet's sample was collected out-of-competition in Patiala on March 7. “The World Anti-Doping Agency's accredited laboratory in Lausanne reported an Adverse Analytical Finding in her sample for the presence of Stanozolol metabolites2,” it said. Stanozolol is a banned anabolic steroid and gained notoriety when Canada’s Ben Johnson tested positive for it at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and stripped of the 100m title.

Kamalpreet faced a four-year ban, but as per World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) rules got a reduced suspension due to her “early admission” and “acceptance of sanction”.

AIU said the ban would commence retrospectively from March 29 2022, the date of her provisional suspension. All her results on and since March 7, including any titles, awards, medals, points, prizes and appearance money would be annulled.

The thrower admitted to anti-doping rule violation on September 27, but not before she got a series of her food supplements tested at a private lab, and then at the WADA-accredited lab. While Kaur did not go for a 'B' sample analysis, “she wished for several supplements to be analysed at the WADA-accredited laboratory in New Delhi”.

The AIU said Kamalpreet made several disclosures in the declarations section of the doping control form (DCF) during sample collection on March 7. AIU asked her to provide specific details concerning her ingestion of each of the supplements that she had declared on DCF and confirm those she wanted to be sent for analysis.

Kamalpreet told AIU she had submitted four of her supplements for analysis by a private lab in India which found “traces of steroid” in one of them. Later, the same 'protein supplement’ was analysed in the New Delhi Laboratory which confirmed the presence of stanozolol. AIU though rejected Kamalpreet’s assertion after consulting its scientific advisor. His opinion was that the use of the protein supplement as claimed by the thrower “was not compatible with the Adverse Analytical Finding as a matter of pharmacokinetics.”

Sprinter Dhanalakshmi Sekar and discus thrower Navjeet Kaur Dhillon are the other Indian athletes suspended by AIU this year, for three years each.

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