NEW DELHI, Sep 5: Star India sprinter Hima Das has been provisionally suspended by the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) for three whereabout failures in 12 months, according to sources.
The 23-year-old Assam runner has not been named in the Hangzhou Asian Games team due to an injury she had sustained earlier this year.
Hima, who has already left the national camp, faces a maximum two-year ban, which can be reduced to a minimum of one year depending on the degree of her fault.
Hima had won a 400m individual silver at the 2018 Jakarta Asian Games.
She was also a part of the gold and silver winning women’s 4x400m and mixed 4x400m relay quartets in Jakarta.Under the World Athletics Anti-Doping (WADA) rules, any combination of three whereabouts failures – filing failure and/or missed test – within a period of 12 months constitute an anti-doping rule violation.
The details of whether Hima’s whereabouts failure related to filing or missed test is not known.
A lower back problem has ben troubling Hima for the past few years. Indian athletics chief coach Radhakrishnan Nair had earlier said that Hima had suffered a hamstring injury too in April just before a Grand Prix event in Bengaluru, and she has been on “medical investigation and treatment”.
That was why Hima missed the Federation Cup in Ranchi in May and the National Inter-State Championship, which was the final selection event for the Asian Games, in June in Bhubaneswar. (PTI)
