M A I N   N E W S

Probe panel clears Sunita
M.S. Unnikrishnan

New Delhi, November 11
Sunita Rani can breathe easy. The one-man Sushil Dutt Salwan Commission, appointed by the Amateur Athletic Federation of India (AAFI), to probe into the Sunita Rani doping case, has exonerated the athlete of any wrong doing. And AAFI president Suresh Kalmadi has promised to “strongly take up the case of Sunita Rani” to get her name cleared of the doping stigma.

Mr Sushil Salwan, who is also the convenor of the legal cell of the Amateur Athletic Association of Asia, questioned 19 persons, including Sunita Rani, her coach Renu Kholi, the doctor who accompanied the athletic contingent to Busan Jawaharlal Jain, SAI doctors, foreign experts and doctors, and officials of the AAFI and the SAI before finalising his voluminous report.

Sunita Rani, the girl from Sunam in Punjab, had tested positive for anabolic steroid nandrolone after she won the gold medal in the 1500m and bronze in the 5000m in the 14th Asian Games at Busan (South Korea) last month. But there were some discrepancies in the test result of her B sample, and the AAFI plans to hold on to this weak link to get Sunita Rani’s name cleared at the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) level. After she tested positive, Sunita Rani was stripped of her medals by the Olympic Council of Asia.

“Sunita Rani is a bright young girl. She had a stress fracture. She had not taken any banned substance, and this had been categorically stated by the coaches and officials of the Indian athletic contingent”, Mr Kalmadi explained.

Mr Salwan, who claimed that he was “totally impartial and unbiased” in his probe, noted his report submitted to the AAFI that “the difference in reading between the A and B samples of code No 191997, i.e 21ng/ml and 6 ng/ml., is unacceptably large, this difference being approximately 250 per cent. It is learnt that the A sample was run and quantified against a known standard of 10ng/ml of nandrolone spiked to blank urine and the B sample was run and quantified against known standards of 5,10 and 20ng/ml which gave a 3 per cent calibration curve. (The instrument printout for the sample B191997 do not give sufficient evidence of these three standards having been run, as no hand written information related to the concentration of the standards is seen on the instrument printout)”.

Mr Salwan observed that the “reason given for the difference between A and B samples by the director of the Busan Dope Testing Lab appears far too simplistic, stating that the A sample is ‘just to compare the concentrations between the sample urine and the known concentration of spiked urine’ whereas the B sample is ‘quantified using a calibration curve’. It, therefore, appears that the results released by the lab for the A sample of any urine tested is actually believed to be an ‘approximate value’, and not necessarily very accurate and suggestive of the actual concentration of a drug/drug metabloite”.