Failed dope test a conspiracy: Kamalpreet Kaur

Kamalpreet Kaur’s first reaction when asked about her failed dope test for anabolic steroid ‘tanozolol. Kamalpreet, who shot to limelight after finishing sixth in her first Olympics with a best throw of 63.70m in Tokyo 2021, claimed that she had never cheated in her life. TOI had spoken to the Punjab athlete hours before her adverse analytical finding (AAF) for the banned substance was made public by the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) through a tweet from its official handle late Wednesday evening.

The tweet read: “The AIU has provisionally suspended discus thrower Kamalpreet Kaur of India for the Presence/Use of a Prohibited Substance (Stanozolol), a breach of the @WorldAthletics Anti-Doping Rules.” When TOI confronted Kamalpreet, the first Indian woman to breach the 65m barrier in discus, with the details it had, the athlete informed that she had herself been on a fact-finding mission to unearth the conspiracy and come out clean. “The truth will come out. I know it’s a conspiracy (against me).

I come from a humble background and struggled a lot to reach where I am today,” she stated. It’s been learnt that Kamalpreet was suspicious about a protein supplement provided by the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) from a private vendor to the national campers. She had even visited the National Anti-Doping Agency (Nada) and National Dope Testing Laboratory (NDTL) in the third week of April to enquire about the authenticity of the product and to get it laboratory tested.

Kamalpreet hinted at the involvement of a senior fellow athlete. In June last year, senior discus thrower Seema Punia, who had qualified for her fourth Olympics in Tokyo, had demanded a hyperandrogenism test on Kamalpreet. She had also written to the AFI,