Jared Anderson contributed to this report.
Host Panjab University has been bending rules to give unfair advantage to its swimmers at the All India Inter-University Championships, a swimmer from a rival school alleges, pointing to a video of what appears to be two very blatant, uncalled false starts in a 50 fly.
The multi-sport event is being hosted by Panjab University in Chandigarh, India. The controversy first hit the public sphere when a swimmer from a rival school, Jain University’s Prithvi Mahesh, posted a Facebook video in which two Panjab swimmers appeared to false start, but were not disqualified. One of the swimmers actually went on to win the bronze medal in the event. Mahesh spoke to The Times of India about the matter, alleging that Panjab was rigging the competition to favor its swimmers.
SwimSwam has received a copy of the video, which you can view below. It appears to show the swimmers in lanes 5 and 6 entering the water before any of the other swimmers have even left the blocks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0G4rj8swxs
The 21-year-old Mahesh also alleged that meet organizers were “tampering with the lanes” to further advantage Panjab swimmers. An anonymous source also alleged in the Times of India piece that the groups for water polo group play had been specifically structured to help certain teams set up an easier road to the knockout rounds.
This comes just two weeks after the Inter-College Boxing Championship hosted at the same Panjab University had similar allegations of corruption, mostly centered around favoritism in scoring among the jury. Five different boxers refused to accept their gold medals in protest of what they considered unfair scoring.
thats why our india havn’t a gold because of these such kinds of faulted players …..DIsqualify them and I request you all couches please don’t interfare the political planner in students life….Please be ethical
Huh?
It’s something smells like money
I’m a USA swimming S&T Official. If I saw that, when I was on deck, I’d have a hard time staying on deck working, even if that call is outside of my jurisdiction. It’d be a shame if national records were broken, and be grounds for over turning if there was by some egregious slip, a world record broken.
they would have done so, as they gave a swimmer a time of 52.78 in 100m fly, and in the finals, that swimmer gave the time of 59, which was his original time…. If this thing is known to the Head Council of the World University. And if they do not take any action against this university then it will be very frustrating.
well, India is close to China, so I guess cheating rubs off?
We actually do have touchpads for most meets like our state chanpionships and even our sub-junior ,junior and senior nationals .These must have been and exception
Seriously? Why bother letting them do that if you also dont use touch pads? I dont see any there… why not just have the timers stop the watch when they hit the flags and you can post results with places and no times??
On a side note, India only cares about cricket, not even soccer, just cricket. With the technology they have there with determining the lbw’s and other wickets, the fact that they dont even use touch pads shows exactly how much they care about this as a whole (I wonder if their stop watches even go to the tenth of a second). I feel sorry for those who were wronged by this though.
Not to mention they couldn’t even fill the pool all the way.
I bet that was done nefariously, too. HEY NO FAIR THEY HAVE LESS WATER IN THEIR LANE, THEY’RE BASICALLY RUNNING.
Also the water color doesn’t seem right. I travel to India for business and its water/air quality is notoriously bad.
those swimmers who did false starts are from the host university
he didn’t even win
the swimmer who did a false starts are from the host university. he won 3rd place in the finals by doing same thing
Appears? Totally blatant false starts.
If you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’
Cody Miller sure is tryin’
A new record for the most meagre excuse to bash Cody Miller!
Couldn’t resist.
This if funny. Wrong…. but funny
I had him down for .10 reaction time. Not bad.