Hardly out of their one-year suspension and the Indian weightlifters find themselves in a mess again -- this time for fleeing international anti-dope officials who made a surprise visit to a training camp in Bangalore.
The inexplicable vanishing act of the seven weightlifters including former Commonwealth champion Kunjarani Devi has drawn flak from the International Weightlifting Federation which has slapped a fine of USD 5,000 on the offenders.
The lifters were undergoing a training camp for selecting probables for the Asian Championship in Dubai and Commonwealth Championship in Melbourne, when the delegation from IWF arrived on July 20.
Renu Bala, who won three bronze medals in the recent Junior Asian Championship in Tashkent, was also among those who skipped the test.
Others absentees were Vicky Batta, Gurminder Singh, Satheesha Rai, Tikna Gopal and Monika Devi.
The Indian Weightlifting Federation, swung into damage control mode, announcing they would not include the absentees in the teams bound for Asian and the Commonwealth Championships.
This would effectively mean India would be represented by a four-member men's team to the Asian Championships to be held in Dubai from September 23 to October 1. However, they were contemplating to have a full team for the Commonwealth by roping in replacements for the October 6 to 9 championship, said IWF President H J Dora.
Defending the lifters, Dora said: "some [lifters] were absent from the camp so they are not in the team, but that does not mean they are not clean."
IWF General Secretary Balbir Singh Bhatia, who has just returned from Bangalore, said, "the Federation wants to send strong signals to the lifters that no laxity on their part would be tolerated.
"We know that the dropped lifters were our best medal prospects and but we have decided not to take them to both the competitions.
"We are not trying to cover up for them as one is free to check all the records of the days they were on leave. They did not vanish all of a sudden."
Their stand notwithstanding, it is baffling why the lifters have been dropped from the two competitions if they have nothing to hide.
Dora further said the National Federation tried to find out the truth by requesting the SAI laboratory to go through the samples of these lifters on August 5, and it was found that all the samples returned negative tests.
"We have also requested the International body to send their officials again at our cost but have not got any reply so far," he said.
