The National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) issued a 16-month penalty to Indian race walker Bhawna Jat on Friday for failure to provide whereabouts.
The National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) on Friday imposed a 16-month ban on Indian race walker Bhawna Jat due to unsatisfactory whereabouts. According to Olympics.com, the 16-month ban will start on August 10, 2023, the day of her initial suspension, and it will expire on December 10, 2024. The decision to suspend Bhawna under Article 2.4 of the NADA Rules was reached by the Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panel (ADDP) on July 10, 2024, but it wasn’t posted on their website until Thursday. In August of last year, Bhawna received a provisional suspension from NADA, which kept her from competing in the Budapest, Hungary, World Athletics Championships of 2023.
Athletes from India who compete at the top level in their sport are chosen annually by NADA to be a part of the Registered Testing Pool (RTP), which is evaluated on a quarterly basis.
Every participant in the RTP is expected to submit a quarterly report detailing their whereabouts, including addresses for lodging, training sites, jobs, events, and other pertinent data. One considers non-compliance to be a filing failure.
In addition, these athletes have to give NADA a 60-minute window for testing; if they don’t, Olympics.com states that a test may be missed.Bhawna, 28, who competed in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and holds a former national record in the women’s 20km race walk, failed two drug tests in May and June 2023. She was also cited for a filing failure in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Bhawna ascribed her filing failure to technical difficulties with the mobile application when attempting to complete the form. She also stated losing her phone, which complicates matters.
