A recent study of International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) shows that a considerable amount of Indian athletes may have been qualified for the Rio Olympics in 2016 with fake or suspect performances, reported by the Times of India.
According to the co-editor of IAAF's National Records for all countries project Heinrich Hubbeling, the list of suspected Indian athletes includes the likes of jumpers Renjith Maheswary (triple jumper), Ankit Sharma (long jumper) and sprinters Dutee Chand and Srabani Nanda.
The German officer, who is also an employee of Asian Athletics Association also said that several other athletes from countries all over the world are also being suspected for the same cause. Apart from India, all these athletes come from Albania, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and all their qualifying rounds is being suspected. These data have been sent to the IAAF and the organisation is said to be marked these data as doubtful in its database.
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Hubbeling also revealed that the IAAF will be investigating the events mentioned above. “The IAAF has ‘created’ a panel with some officials looking for 'faked performances and faked birthdates' in the future," said the athletics statistician.
"We all hope for decisions by the IAAF, including action against the officials who were involved in such fraudulent actions," he added.
Renjith had performed outstandingly on the last day of qualifications in Bengaluru, leaping 17.30 meters. The long jumper Ankit Sharma had also performed well in the qualifications who was recorded 8.19 meters in Almaty. However, both the jumpers had huge variations in their performance in Rio where they were recorded at 16.13 meters and 7.67 meters respectively.
However, in the matter of the sprinter duo from India Dutee and Srabani, the automatic timing is being suspected by the IAAF. It is believed that somehow the automatic timing had produced super-fast timings for being faulty.
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International athletics statisticians have compiled a list of these doubtful events and took primary action by removing the specific names from the record lists. According to Hubbeling, this study of IAAF was checked by famous statistician Mirko Jalava who also found the data disturbing.
Hubbeling revealed that this was not the first time for this kind of situation, "In the 1990s we had a similar situation mostly by African countries, which entered athletes with supposedly faked performances. When I pointed out this situation to the IAAF, the respective federations got warnings and this cheating stopped.”
He also told that these types of cheating have been resumed by some countries in the recent times. “For some years now this cheating has been resumed by some other federations," Hubbeling said after compiling the results.
