More than 20 athletes from various sports have returned positive for banned drugs in tests conducted during the National Games in Goa in October-November in one of the biggest heaps of doping cases in the country.
Most of the 20-odd dope offenders have been handed provisional suspension by the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA), which had collected dope samples from the participants in the October 25 to November 9 multi-sport event.
Many have won medals in the Games while there were a few international players.
There were nine track and field athletes and seven weightlifters among the dope offenders, according to sources.
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The most prominent of the seven weightlifters who failed dope tests was Vandana Gupta, a double bronze-medal winner in the Commonwealth Championships.
"Yes, seven weightlifters have failed dope tests during the Goa National Games and there could be more in the coming days," a source from the Indian Weightlifting Federation told PTI.
The 29-year-old Vandana, from Uttar Pradesh, had won gold in the women's 76kg category in Goa with a total lift of 207kg.
She is a bronze-medal winner in 63kg category in both the 2013 and 2017 Commonwealth Championships, besides finishing fourth in 63kg class in the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
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Cyclist Anita Devi was handed provisional suspension by the NADA on December 6 after her urine sample collected on November 3 was found to contain banned drug 19-Norandrosterone, an anabolic androgenic steroid.
Devi was a member of the women's 4km pursuit team from Manipur that won the gold medal.
The Goa National Games were held after a seven-year delay due to issues related to building of infrastructure and a huge number of dope offenders has now come out from the multi-sport event.
The 2015 National Games in Kerala had seen 16 dope positive cases while the count in the 2022 edition in Gujarat was 10.
