Vinesh Phogat, a wrestler, declared her retirement from the sport after experiencing heartache during her Paris Olympics campaign.
Wrestler Vinesh Phogat was sent a notice by the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) on Wednesday over his refusal to provide an explanation for his whereabouts, with a deadline of 14 days. It is mandatory for all athletes who are enrolled in NADA’s Registered Testing Pool (RTP), including Vinesh, to furnish information regarding their accessibility for drug testing. It is deemed a whereabouts failure if they fill out the information and are later discovered to be unavailable at that specific location.
The wrestler-turned-politician received notice from the NADA stating that she had presumably violated her whereabouts as she was not present for a drug test on September 9 at her residence in Kharkhoda village, Sonepat.
After a heartbreaking Olympic campaign in Paris, where she advanced for the final but was disqualified before her gold-medal match due to her weight, Vinesh had announced her retirement from the sport.
Recently, Vinesh and fellow wrestler Bajrang Punia joined the Congress party. Punia is running from the Julana constituency in the forthcoming Haryana Assembly election. These days, she has been extremely busy campaigning in the Julana constituency.”You are hereby given a formal notice to notify you about apparent failure to comply with the whereabouts requirements of the ADR, and to invite you to make any comments before we come to a final decision on the matter,” the notice from NADA said.
“You were to be tested on that dav at that time and location by a Dope Control Officer (DCO). But since you weren’t there at the specified place, he couldn’t find you to test.” Either Vinesh accepts her failure or she can show that she was there for around sixty minutes.It should be noted that a single location failure does not automatically result in a violation of anti-doping regulations. NADA cannot charge an athlete until there are three whereabouts failures (missing tests or filing failures) in a 12-month period.
