India stands sixth on WADA Anti-doping rules violations charts for 2016

What's the story?

In the list of countries with the most anti-doping rules violations (ADRVs) released by the World Anti-Doping Agency. that deals with the doping violations across all sports, India has occupied the sixth place for the year 2016 after the percentage that tested 'positive' for doping was 2.7%, a 0.4% increase from 2015.

The athletics division topped the list of cases with a total of 23 samples showing a positive result, second to the 29 cases that were recorded in 2014.

In case you didn't know

In 2017, India's own testing organisation, National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) claimed that the athletes' awareness program proved to be fruitful as the total number of positive cases came down to a figure of 69, which also doubled up as the lowest figure in slightly less than a decade.

Heart of the Matter

In the report, it was mentioned that there were a total of 1,600 violations across 112 sports with athletics topping the list with 205 violations. Bodybuilding followed with 183 violations while the cyclists were third on the list after committing 165 violations.

Italy topped the list of countries with most violations (147) while France (86), The United States (76) and Australia (75) rounded off the top four.

The positive for India from the 2016 results was the drop in rankings from third to sixth, an effort of the increase in the number of tests and samples taken across various sporting events conducted right through the year. However, only 2699 samples were taken, the least in number after the 2331 samples taken in 2009.

From 2013 right through 2015, India occupied third place on the charts and the fall in rankings would have come as a welcome change in fortunes for the country and the doping agency as well.

What's Next?

With a whole lot of sporting events set to take place in the rest of the year, the NADA will hope to up their game to ensure that the percentage of positive results falls even further.

Author's Take

Doping has always proved to be a major drawback when it comes to sports for which the NADA will hope to chalk out a firm strategy and work on it to reduce the room for violators to escape stringent action.