All medal winners of Athletics Nationals to undergo dope test
Chennai, June 10: The National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) will collect samples from all medal winners at the ongoing National Inter-State Senior Athletics Championships instead of taking random samples for testing. There are 43 medal events in the championships but there might be athletes who win more than one medal. A NADA dope testing team from Bengaluru arrived on Thursday, a day before the start of the event, which will serve as a selection trial for the July 28 to Aug 8 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Last month, Maharashtra quarter-miler Aishwarya Mishra evaded dope testing agencies as she “disappeared” after winning gold in the Federation Cup in April with the third fastest Indian time (51.18 seconds) ever. (PTI)
Russian canoeists banned for being in state doping program
Geneva, June 10: Three Russian canoeists including a gold medalist at the 2012 London Olympics were banned on Friday for being part of the state-backed doping program eight years ago. The Court of Arbitration for Sport said in a statement from Lausanne, Switzerland that its judges upheld appeals filed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) after the International Canoe Federation refused to prosecute individual cases. The judges were “comfortably satisfied that Aleksandr Dyachenko, Nikolay Lipkin and Aleksandra Dupik had each committed anti-doping violations and that the decision taken by the ICF not to pursue the matters was wrong,” the court said. Four-year bans for steroid doping were imposed on Dyachenko, the Olympic champion in men’s K2 200-metre sprint at London, and Lipkin, a multiple world champion who will be stripped of a title won in 2014 in Moscow. CAS said a two-year ban was imposed on paracanoeist Dupik, who tested positive in 2014 for the diuretic furosemide which can be used to hide the presence of other drugs. (AP)
St. Pauli denies use of its stadium for Leipzig’s cup game
Hamburg, June 10: German football club St. Pauli has refused the use of its stadium for a German Cup game because Leipzig is one of the teams involved. Leipzig, the defending champion, was drawn at Hamburg-based FC Teutonia Ottensen in the first round. The fourth-tier club’s 5,000-capacity ground is unsuitable for the game on August 31 because artificial grass is not permitted in the cup, so it asked its bigger neighbour if it could use its Millerntor Stadium to host the match. But St. Pauli, which plays in the second division and has played in the Bundesliga before, turned down Teutonia’s application on principle against Leipzig’s business model and due to concerns that allowing the Red Bull-backed team to play in its stadium would lead to protests from its own fans. (AP)