Doping scandal -Aints Junior Athletics Surge. Did Coach Ramesh take the abbreviation?

The Kotak Pullela Gopichand Academy, a spacious 10 hectare high-performance center in Hyderabad, houses an athletics academy in which tomorrow and evenings usually sail with a lively symphony of rhythmic foot foot and gruff coaching commands. Tuesday of December 24th was no different. At least on the face. Among all the frenetic sporting activities, the academy met with an unscathing grade.

The institution, a beacon of national sporting dreams, has carefully shaped some of the most electrifying sprinter and flowing hurdles of India in India in recent years. A melting pot of new sporting talents. It was the Dronacharya award winner Ramesh Nagapuri, whose name is taken with awe. In short, in a hurry, with a sparkling smile, he is the architect of the Indian sprint dreams, the line from the route to the podium for aspiring athletes.
But on this December day, the tension turned the air in the practice area with the sudden appearance of an unusual sight: official people in the strong white clothing that came out in the middle of the colorful of the athletes. Officers of the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) had depressed the academy to examine one of the estimated sprinters of coach Ramesh, a young young person whose recent 200-meter exploit had raised hope for the birth of a national star.

The young athlete, Shanmuga Srinivas Nalubothu, who saw the Nada officials, panicked. At the moment the sprinter mutated into a hurdle. He carried over a concrete wall and before the officers could call him or try to stop him, he disappeared into the thick leaves. The officials were frozen frozen; Shock written on their faces. This was a premiere of all the many tricks that athletes use to duck them.

A day later, Nada called Shanmuga and asked him why he had run away when he saw her. He stated that he had carried out the disappeared action on the case of Ramesh. A damn charges against a famous trainer.

As expected, a formal complaint at the desk of the Athletics Association of India (AFI) and accused the coach that he would make his athletes disappear instead of presenting himself for Nada tests. The AFI lined and hell and settled for his proven tactic: dodging. A top official made a two-day vacation. Another who was already in the comfort of the foreign bank offered vague hearsay and admitted to listening to whisper, but claimed not to have seen any concrete evidence.

When it was confronted, Ramesh offered a narrow rejection. “I don't know anything about these allegations,” he said, wearing the Dronacharya Award as a shield against the allegations. “And I don't believe them. I still have my job.”

Yes, Ramesh still has his job. And that is the current tragedy of the Indian junior athletics program. Ramesh is suspended and the program is in suspended animation. A thick cloud of doubt has now been dependent on any remarkable performance in recent years. Is the slow and steady increase in Indian athletics just a mirage that is supported by performance -enhancing nutritional supplements?

Since this fateful day in December, more than four months have passed when Shanmuga jumped over the wall and had injured the trust of athletics fans in India. There is no proof that Shanmuga has either voluntarily or banned on the instance of coach Ramesh forbidden substances. But there is an inviolable fact that represents a preliminary indictment against both: the fact that Shanmuga has publicly escaped the Nada exam is enough proof that something is lazy with the junior light athletics program. Why should Shanmuga at Ramesh's instance scoot if he were clean? The answer to this one question is enough to turn the program inside out. In these four months, however, the AFI has not found time to ask this simple question for fear of getting the obvious answer.

And so we have a situation in which young athletes instead of preparing for the upcoming violent European competition, asking themselves whether the person they trust is the type who has endangered their burgeoning careers for personal, false, fame.

This is the question: What hope remains for the future of sport?

Pargat Singh, the former Indian hockey captain and now an MLA from Punjab, believes that the system is lazy with trainers who constantly exploit players and athletes. “Today's coaches just want to win,” he says. “Not that you shouldn't. But the idea must be holistic at the junior level. Winning is a long-term fight. Doping is shortened.”
It also shortens the life of athletes. The ban is simply not a physical criminal action. It is a psychological blow. Some even call it a mental amputation. Doping demands a much more serious tribute to the athletes than we can imagine. It shortens the athlete's trajectory. It leaves an emptiness that the athletes cannot fill all their lives and reminds them of humiliation.

However, Nada's suspension of Ramesh has far more effects than individual humiliation. The creation of an entire generation of athletes will now have doubts. Former medalists are observed with suspicion. So much that even the ban on the 100 -m -national record holder of women, Dule Chand, is viewed by the same lens because it was trained by Ramesh. Should we keep these two silver medals on a larger exam in 2018?

There is an old saying: “If you continue to deal with the devil, he will follow you home one day.” This probably applies to the litany of drug abuse cases that have recently fallen out: Sai Sangeetha, India's fastest junior quarters miler; Jeyavindhiya Jegadish, sixth in the 400 m hurdles in the U-20 Asians; Durga Singh, 1500 -M champion by Khelo India Youth Games Girls; V. Neha, silver medalist in the 100 m and 200 m at the Junior Nationals in Coimbatore; Summy, silver medalist Fed Cup last year.

We should still come to terms with 2011, a year that is drawn by a rash of positive tests that followed India's triumph at the Commonwealth and Asian Games 2010. The victorious 4x400m relay quartet, which was clouded by drug abuse, contained names like Ashwini Akunji, Sini Jose and Mandeep Kaur. At that time, Ramesh served as an assistant under the Ukrainian trainer of the Ukrainian coach Yuri Ogorodnik. Although he navigated these turbulent waters without formal charges, whisper never died. His complicity never stood, hung in silence in the corridors of Indian athletics.

The shadows chased him where he went, but his work continued when prestigious tasks fell into his lap. His legend grew as the man with the Midas touch. The disturbing past that slowly went back into the background when his athletes won after the medal medal.

The case is a tragedy for a man who is famous for his oracle -like intuition. Famous in his ability to recognize aspiring talent, which India's star Hurdler Jyothi Yarraji also belong to a level, this call is in ruins. His absence of the Indian contingent on the Asian U-18 in Saudi Arabia was not only a logistical detail, but a significant indictment against this famous heritage.

Ramesh's telephone lines remain stubborn. Dual Chand, his creation, was only able to raise a hesitant defense: “My coach is clean”, she insists on it, even though there is a doubt. “I don't think he would do something like that.”

But it is the silence of the AFI president and other high -ranking personalities that are more amazed. Hopefully the AFI or the sports authority of India – the employers of Ramesh – to clean their stable, laid a better foundation this time. Something good could stir again in the broken landscape of the Junior sports program. And athletes will run in the top national and international competitions. Not from Nada teams.