A number of India's top athletes may have qualified for the Rio Olympic Games with fake/suspect performances, if a study by International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) statisticians is to be believed.
According to leading athletics statistician Heinrich Hubbeling, co-editor of IAAF's National Records for all countries project, a list of Indian athletes with doubtful qualifying records reportedly includes the names of triple jumper Renjith Maheswary, long jumper Ankit Sharma and sprinters Dutee Chand and Srabani Nanda. Germany's Hubbeling, who also works for the Asian Athletics Association, said that the Indians are among other athletes from Albania, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, whose qualifying performances have been found to be doubtful. He said he has sent these data to IAAF which has marked these marks as doubtful in its database.
“The IAAF has “created” a panel with some officials looking for `faked performances and faked birth dates' in the future,” said Hubbeling. “We all hope for decisions by the IAAF, including action against the officials who were involved in such fraudulent actions,” he said.
The superhuman efforts of Renjith, who leaped to 17.30m in Bengaluru on the last day of qualification, and Ankit Sharma, who touched down at 8.19m in Almaty, were under the scanner because of huge variation in their performances from the past and the subsequent flop show at Rio where they recorded leaps of 16.13m and 7.67m.
In the case of Dutee and Srabani it has emerged that the automatic timing at the event could have been faulty, resulting in the super-fast timings. The three podium finishers in women's 100m in the Almaty meet held in June never repeated their efforts and clocked 11.69s to 11.72 seconds in Rio. The same applied in Srabani's case. The women's 4x100m also seemed to have benefited as they clocked their best of 43.42s in Almaty in July two months after clocking 44.03 in Beijing.
Top international athletics statisticians, who keep a tab on the athletes' performances, have compiled a list of such doubtful performances and removed the names from their record list. Hubbeling said his study was also backed up by the Tilastopaja database maintained by noted statistician Mirko Jalava, which included all these marks valued as doubtful by Mirko.
“In the 1990s we had a similar situation mostly by African countries, which entered athletes with supposedly faked performances. When I pointed out this situation to IAAF, the federations got warnings and cheating stopped. For some years now this has been resumed by some other federations,” Hubbeling said after compiling the results.
Coe had flayed methods
IAAF chief Sebastian Coe touched on the topic at Rio. “When a time or height or distance is registered, it is important we have assurance it is a bona fide reading, particularly if it is being used as a qualification for a championships,” Coe had said. “We have dealt with cases where we have been suspicious of a mark that has been recorded,” he said. The working group on performance results manipulation will be headed by French Athletics chief and IAAF council member Bernard Amsalem.
