New Delhi: India’s Commonwealth Games campaign has suffered another major blow with Olympian and 2022 Birmingham CWG’s silver medallist Tulika Maan being provisionally suspended by the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) for alleged whereabouts failures, ending her Glasgow 2026 participation even without flying out of India.Sources told TOI that Tulika, one of India’s brightest medal prospects in the women’s +78kg judo category, has accumulated three whereabouts failures within a rolling 12-month period, triggering a provisional suspension under the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Code. She has been summoned by NADA and is scheduled to appear before the anti-doping body on Thursday.A whereabouts failure is an anti-doping rule compliance issue that includes filing failures and missed tests. A filing failure occurs when an athlete fails to submit or update mandatory location information for out-of-competition testing, while a missed test is recorded when a doping control officer is unable to locate the athlete during the declared 60-minute testing window. Any combination of three filing failures or missed tests within 12 months constitutes an anti-doping rule violation and carries a standard sanction of two years, unless successfully challenged. Tulika’s provisional suspension comes as anotherblow to India’s CWG preparations. The Indian contingent has now been reduced to 122 athletes, with the heavyweight judoka set to miss the Games after being provisionally suspended. The Indian judo team is scheduled to leave for Glasgow on July 27, with competitions beginning on July 31.The 27-year-old has been one of the leading faces of Indian judo over the past decade. Raised by her mother, Delhi Police sub-inspector Amrita, after losing her father at a young age, Tulika switched from football to judo at the age of eight before rising through the ranks under coach Yashpal Solanki.Her breakthrough moment came at the 2022 CWG in Birmingham, where she won a silver medal in the women’s +78kg category, becoming only the second Indian judoka to achieve the feat. She later battled through a serious knee injury to qualify for the Paris Olympics, where she represented India as the country’s lone judoka.The provisional suspension now casts a shadow over the career of one of India’s most accomplished judokas, with the final outcome dependent on the proceedings before NADA. If upheld, Tulika could face a suspension of up to two years, dealing a significant blow to both her career and India’s future medal hopes.
