The BCCI official will soon be meeting to strategize some plans to tackle the upcoming pressure from the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) that wants Virat Kohli and Co under its control. There is a Committee of Administrators (CoA) meeting in Mumbai on November 3, where the issue will be discussed but, as of now, the BCCI is unlikely to shift from its current stand.
The top officials of Indian cricket board reckon that trying to get a Virat Kohli or MS Dhoni sign the ‘whereabouts clause’ is one of the crucial reasons that NADA wants the control over BCCI. Whereabouts are information provided by a limited number of top elite athletes about their location to the International Sports Federation (IF) or National Anti-Doping Organization (NADA in this case), which also add them to their individual registered testing pool as part of these top elite athletes’ anti-doping responsibilities.
The BCCI had hired Sweden’s International Drug Testing Management (IDTM) for testing work and is likely to continue with it. With reports emerging that NADA is likely to send its Doping Control Officers (DCO) during the domestic tournaments and if BCCI doesn’t co-operate, they will take some legal actions, but senior board officials are wondering whether that would be as easy as top government officials are making it out to be.
Describing the scenario, a top official said, “BCCI is not a signatory to NADA code and therefore under no compulsion to release our cricketers for the dope test. We are under ICC, which is WADA compliant. At ICC events, our cricketers are tested by WADA. But since we are not a National Sports Federation (NSF), we are under no obligation to become NADA signatory.”
He further added: “Testimony to our transparent process is the latest WADA report where 153 of our cricketers were tested ‘In Competition’ and ‘Out of Competition’ and there was only one dope positive result.”
Asked about the legal threat, the BCCI official sarcastically said: “BCCI, in any case, is fighting so many legal battles! But seriously, NADA officials think that they will just land up at IPL or Ranji Trophy and force a BCCI registered cricketer to undergo a dope test. We didn’t know it was this simple.”
