NEW DELHI: Star India wrestler Yogeshwar Dutt will have to wait to know whether his bronze medal from the 2012 London Olympics is upgraded to silver till the time his sample is cleared by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Reports emerged that the grappler’s bronze would be upgraded to silver after second-place finisher of the London Games — late Besik Kudukhov of Russia — was stripped off his medal for failing a dope test.
An official confirmation is still awaited and a top Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) official today told PTI that even Yogeshwar’s dope test from the 2012 Games has to be cleared before he could be handed the medal. “Yogeshwar’s tests are also being conducted and once his dope test comes out clean, then only he will be handed the silver medal,” the official said on the condition of anonymity. As per WADA’s revised norms, samples taken for dope tests from international tournaments are now been stored in deep freeze up to 10 years in order to allow the use of advanced technology, available with the passage of time, to catch the dope cheats to ensure that “the clean athletes get justice even if it comes a bit late”. The IOC has been re-testing the samples collected at London as well as 2008 Beijing Olympics, besides other international tournaments, keeping in view of the new rules. As per Russian agency, flowrestling.org, the four-time world champion and two-time Olympic medallist Kudukhov, who had died in a car crash in 2013 in southern Russia, was found to have used a banned substance in a test conducted by the WADA. As a result, Yogeshwar, who had bagged a bronze medal in men’s 60kg freestyle category in London, is now set to join Sushil Kumar as the other Indian silver medallist wrestler from the 2012 Olympics. Yogeshwar, who had bowed out in the first round of men’s 65kg freestyle at the recently concluded Rio Olympic Games, had lost to Kudukhov in the pre-quarterfinals at London. But once the Russian advanced to the final, Yogeshwar got another chance in the repechage round and went on to win bronze.–PTI
