The Board of Control for Cricket in India may have lost a valuable opportunity to hold a check on its players had it accepted the Wada (World Anti-Doping Agency) code that deals with drugs, both performance-enhancing and recreational, in sport.
It’s more than three years since the BCCI rejected the world drug agency’s testing protocols on the premise that the “whereabouts clause” was unacceptable.
By the “whereabouts clause”, athletes have to state where they will be, in and out of competition, so that surprise drug tests may be carried out on them on any day. Athletes are also to specify an hour on each day and name the place they would be available three months in advance.
Senior Indian cricketers convinced the cricket authorities that such disclosures might be an infringement of their privacy while some were even said to have pointed out that revealing their whereabouts could pose a security threat to them.
Instead of finding a way to deal with the “whereabouts clause” in consultation with Wada, the cricket board simply went by the wish of its senior players much as they did in the matter of the Umpires Decision Review System.
Had the cricketers been forced to comply with the Wada code, they would have needed to follow a far more disciplined lifestyle and not risk this image of party drug-snorting Casanovas with a willing woman on each arm as has been thrust upon them by the example of one of their kind arrested for spot-fixing.
Indian cricketers are not subject to the National Anti-Doping Agency testing and code either because the BCCI does not come under the sports ministry. Had cricketers been subjected to the rigorous discipline of international sportsmen who have to follow all the procedures of random drug testing, they may have had less reason — and occasion — to dabble in malpractices induced by bookmakers.
Also, cricketers may not have planned to stay at other than team hotels although various theories are being floated now on how a Rajasthan Royals player was in another hotel in the same city on the day of his arrest following the team’s match there.