Four Indian athletes handed provisional suspension, two banned for doping offences
New Delhi (PTI): Goa National Games silver medal-winning steeplechaser Mohammed Nur Hasan, 2019 Asian Championships bronze medallist Murli Kumar Gavit, and India's World Cross Country Championships participants Hemraj Gurjar and Anjali Kumari have been put under provisional suspension after they tested positive for banned substances.
Distance runner G Lakshmanan and sprinter Himani Chandel have also been handed two and four-year bans respectively by the National Anti-Doping Agency panels in fresh doping cases in Indian athletics.
Hasan had won a 3000m steeplechase gold each in the Federation Cup and National Open Championships last year.
Gurjar had won the National Cross Country Championships in Gaya in January but finished 88th at the World Cross Country in Belgrade in March.
Anjali Kumari had finished second in the National Cross Country Championships in January and was chosen for the Worlds where she finished 80th.
Gavit, who won a bronze in 2019 Asian Championships in Doha, was the gold winner in a strange 5000m race at the National Open Championships last year where no athlete seemed keen to win the race.
All four of them figured in the latest list of athletes handed provisional suspension by the National Anti Doping Agency (NADA). It is not known where and when the samples were collected.
Meanwhile, it also emerged that Lakshmanan, who won a gold each in 5000m and 10,000m in the 2017 Asian Championships, has been handed two-year ban from August 10 last year onwards. His name figured among those who were handed sanctions by either the Anti-Doping Disciplinary Panel or the Anti-Doping Appeal Panel of the NADA.
Top sprinter Himani Chandel has also been banned for four years effective from June 15 last year.
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'Amazon of Aligarh': Google Doodle pays tribute to India's first woman wrestler Hamida Banu
New Delhi (PTI): It was on this day in 1954 when Hamida Banu defeated famed wrestler Baba Pahalwan in just one minute and 34 seconds. While Baba Pahalwan deemed it fit to retire from professional wrestling, Banu's career expanded to international arenas and her victories reported across the globe.
Commemorating Banu's victory and to pay tribute to her as "India's first woman wrestler," Google on Saturday put up a colourful doodle on its homepage.
Born into a family of wrestlers in the early 1900s near Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, Banu grew up wrestling, winning over 300 competitions throughout her career that spanned the 1940s and 1950s at a time when women's participation in athletics was strongly discouraged.
Banu, however, competed with men anyway, and issued an open challenge to all male wrestlers, wagering her hand in marriage to whoever defeats her, Google wrote in a post.
Banu's success in international matches gained her further acclaim. One of these matches was the one against Russian woman wrestler Vera Chistilin, who she defeated in under two minutes.
Having made newspaper headlines for years, Banu came to be known as the "Amazon of Aligarh".
The bouts she won, her diet, and her training regimen were widely covered.
According to a BBC report, she weighed 108kg and was 5ft 3in tall.
"Her daily diet included 5.6 litres of milk, 2.8 litres of soup, 1.8 litres of fruit juice, a fowl, nearly 1kg of mutton and almonds, half a kilo of butter, 6 eggs, two big loaves of bread, and two plates of biryani," the British media outlet reported.
Reuters noted that she slept for nine hours and trained for six.
A "trailblazer of her time," Banu not only fought fellow wrestlers but the norms of her times.
"Hamida Banu was a trailblazer of her time, and her fearlessness is remembered throughout India and across the world. Outside of her sporting accomplishments, she will always be celebrated for staying true to herself," Google's note read.
