The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has dismissed swimmer Amar Muralidharan’s appeal challenging the decisions of the National Anti Doping Disciplinary Panel (NADDP) and the National Anti-Doping Appeal Panel (NADAP) in a methylhexaneamine (MHA) violation case.
The dismissal of Muralidharan’s appeal, which was a rare case of a ‘national-level’ athlete approaching the highest court in sports arbitration, meant that the two-year suspension slapped on the swimmer by NADDP on November 5, 2012, would stand.
Interestingly, Muralidharan, who had tested positive during the National Aquatic Championships in Jaipur on August 26, 2010, in a random test, had appealed against the NADDP decision, and the appeal panel had given him the option of accepting his mistake and getting the benefit of “delays not attributable to the athlete” during the disciplinary panel hearing that had lasted for more than two years.
On this very ground, the NADAP had given a relief of 314 days to eight of the 11 MHA positive athletes, who had been awarded two years of suspension each from the date of the decision in 2012 while also disqualifying all their results from the sample collection date in 2010. Muralidharan refused to accept his positive result citing procedural errors during the testing process but saw his appeal being dismissed by NADAP, which noted that the disciplinary panel had gone into all the aspects of lapses on the part of the testers.
On June 17 last year, Muralidharan moved CAS “against the NADA, the National Dope Testing Laboratory, and the Indian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, arguing that the challenged decisions should be annulled on the grounds that his sample had not been processed in accordance with the NADA Anti-Doping Regulations (ADR) and the WADA International Standard for Testing (IST).”
