By the time Lalit Kumar crouched at the starting blocks for the men’s 100m final at the Delhi state athletics meet on Tuesday, the 20-year-old was only ever going to finish first.
All seven of Kumar’s opponents withdrew from the race at the capital’s Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium citing cramp or muscle strains.
Organizers said they suspect the athletes, along with numerous other competitors on the third and final day of the competition, pulled out after getting wind of the imminent arrival of officials from the Indian National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA).
Photo: AFP
The visit came a day after a video shared on social media appeared to show a restroom in the stadium littered with syringes and packets of the performance-enhancing drug erythropoietin.
“An odd withdrawal is understandable, but when seven runners withdraw, you know something is fishy,” Delhi Athletics Association secretary Sandeep Mehta said yesterday.
“There are some throwers as well who disappeared before competition and all of them should be tested by NADA. We are sharing with them details of the athletes who fled,” Mehta said. “If any of them return adverse results, we will ban them in Delhi and will recommend the Athletics Federation of India does the same.”
Mehta also said that some athletes from the meet did not turn up to collect their medals, raising more doping suspicions.
India ranked second behind Russia in anti-doping rule contraventions in a World Anti-Doping Agency report published in May.
Kumar, who was hailed on social media for being an “honest athlete in a dirty sport,” was dismayed at how the competition panned out.
“I was really looking forward to running against the best athletes, but nobody turned up,” he told the Indian Express newspaper. “Everyone was scared of getting tested. As an athlete, I feel very hurt and let down.”
The Delhi Athletics Association said it would award Kumar a medal and certificate even though he was the lone runner in the final.
“He did compete with others in the heats, and it’s not his fault that opponents disappeared before the final,” Mehta said. “We believe it would be wrong to deny him his medal and the certificate, and he will have them soon.”
In the junior steeplechase event, a girl continued to run even after crossing the finish line and a doping control officer had to chase her to get her sample.
The under-16 boys hammer throw also had only one participant.
Additional reporting by AFP
The qualifying round of the World Baseball Classic (WBC) is to be held at the Taipei Dome between Feb. 21 and 25, Major League Baseball (MLB) announced today. Taiwan’s group also includes Spain, Nicaragua and South Africa, with two of the four teams advancing onto the 2026 WBC. Taiwan, currently ranked second in the world in the World Baseball Softball Confederation rankings, are favorites to come out of the group, the MLB said in an article announcing the matchups. Last year, Taiwan finished in a five-way tie in their group with two wins and two losses, but finished last on tiebreakers after giving
North Korea’s FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup-winning team on Saturday received a heroes’ welcome back in the capital, Pyongyang, with hundreds of people on the streets to celebrate their success. They had defeated Spain on penalties after a 1-1 draw in the U17 World Cup final in the Dominican Republic on Nov. 3. It was the second global title in two months for secretive North Korea — largely closed off to the outside world; they also lifted the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup in September. Officials and players’ families gathered at Pyongyang International Airport to wave flowers and North Korea flags as the
For King Faisal, a 20-year-old winger from Ghana, the invitation to move to Brazil to play soccer “was a dream.” “I believed when I came here, it would help me change the life of my family and many other people,” he said in Sao Paulo. For the past year and a half, he has been playing on the under-20s squad for Sao Paulo FC, one of South America’s most prominent clubs. He and a small number of other Africans are tearing across pitches in a country known as the biggest producer and exporter of soccer stars in the world, from Pele to Neymar. For
Coco Gauff of the US on Friday defeated top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka 7-6 (7/4), 6-3 to set up a showdown with Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen in the final of the WTA Finals, while in the doubles, Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching was eliminated. Gauff generated six break points to Belarusian Sabalenka’s four and built on early momentum in the opening set’s tiebreak that she carried through to the second set. She is the youngest player at 20 to make the final at the WTA Finals since Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki in 2010. Zheng earlier defeated Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejcikova of the Czech Republic 6-3, 7-5 to book
RSS