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OLYMPIC
SPECIAL
Wrong
Track
Neglect
and needles threaten Indian athletic hopes. Will the doctor accept responsibility?
By
Sharda Ugra
 |
| Sunita
Rani had met qualifying standards for three Olympic events but cannot
run in Sydney |
Trick
question: what are India's top two middle-distance runners up to these
days? Training overseas for the Olympics? You wish. At the secluded Sports
Authority of India (SAI) centre outside Bangalore counting down the days
to the Asian Track & Field meet in Jakarta? Wrong again. Jyotirmoyee
Sikdar, winner of two gold medals at the Bangkok Asian Games, is miles
away from Sydney in every possible way. Her career is as good as over
because of an injury to the achilles tendon. Sunita Rani, considered Sikdar's
successor, has met Olympic qualifying standards in three events but is
also grounded.
She has barely salvaged her career after a stress fracture to her hip
and it could be months before she resumes heavy training. Every time a
train rumbles past her home in an anonymous town called Sunam in Punjab,
the medals in her living room cabinet
give a little shiver.
It should
shake Indian athletics to its roots, this discovery that its top two performers
from 1998 (Sikdar became the first Indian runner to win two golds at the
Asiad after P.T. Usha, anchoring the relay team to a medal in the 4x400
relay, Sunita won silver and bronze) are cut down by ailments which turned
from routine sports injuries to career-threatening conditions. Particularly
since the Amateur Athletics Federation of India (AAFI) has hired a Ukranian
sports medicine specialist at $2,000 a month to deal exclusively with
its athletes. Or are the unorthodox, injection-for-ills methods of Yuri
Boyko itself the reason for the breakdowns? The evidence against the Ukranian
is beginning to pile up because Sikdar and Sunita's case histories are,
in a word, terrifying.
Instead of being treated with kid gloves, injuries of the two athletes
were regarded casually, first with reassurances of "no problem"
and then, to debilitating effect, with unknown injections. Sports medicine
specialist and knee surgeon Ashok Rajgopal, who has treated weightlifter
Kunjarani Devi and badminton player Pullela Gopichand, told India Today,
"Sunita told me that she had received 15 injections in and around
the hip joint. She said she had received milky white injections and if
you put two and two together, you will come to the conclusion that she
was receiving steroid injections for the injury."
Yash Gulati,
orthopaedic surgeon at Apollo Hospital who had met the athlete and her
coach Renu Kohli in early July, adds, "Sunita's coach Renu Kohli
informed me that Sunita had been given injections by Boyko and I inferred
that they were steroid injections." Both doctors confirmed that the
athlete and coach came to them with no written prescriptions or case papers.
Sunita's
horror story began in January this year when she felt pain in the region
of her groin, which grew more severe all through the summer. Every time
the pain resurfaced, injections were administered repeatedly. Rajgopal
is shocked: "For a national-level athlete to be complaining of groin
pain, jabbing her with shots is like condemning the kid for life."
The usual procedure for treating complaints of pain by long-distance runners
is to "anticipate what's happening-it could be a muscle pull or an
impending stress fracture or a stress fracture".
Sikdar told
India Today she had received no less than 12 injections in her tendons.
"Eight in the right leg, four in the left, but I don't know what
they were, I heard the word 'hydrochloric' being used," she says.
Sports specialists believe that Sikdar, who first complained of pain in
March last year, was probably given doses of hydrocortisone.
Not only
is Boyko's mode of treatment unusual, his method of injecting into the
affected area also leaves the body prone to infection. Orthopaedic surgeon
Trilochan Singh, says, "If any infection enters the body while injecting
directly into the area, it can damage the joint or the tendon completely.
Injections of this kind must be given in a completely sterile environment.
Like an operation theatre."
Boyko, a
57-year-old who responds to questions with a genial "no English",
comes armed with imposing credentials. Sports medicine specialist for
30 years, No. 2 team doctor to the USSR athletics squad in 1988, he has
worked with athletes like the legendary pole vaulter Sergei Bubka and
Olympic sprint champ Valery Borzov. He does not seem a man who can be
second guessed. Unlike SAI doctors, who keep records of treatments and
prescriptions, Boyko has a free hand at the national camp. According to
some, he describes himself as "a doctor who wants an athlete to run
tomorrow ... not after six months". SAI's Executive Director (Teams)
O.P. Bhatia says Bokyo is a "field doctor, not a hospital. We don't
need to have his accounts". Lalit Bhanot, AAFI secretary, brushes
off allegations of malpractice blaming the talk on lobbying by Indian
doctors. Says selector and former sprinter Adile Sumarivala: "Indian
doctors are feeling threatened as they lie exposed by the results given
by foreign coaches and doctors." Lobbies aside, Boyko must be accountable
to his profession and his peers. Or else they will be left treating broken
bodies and broken dreams.
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