Cases of age fraud have been common within the Indian sporting circuit. But little did anyone think that it would be a prominent practice in the Mecca of Wrestling Dagestan until Russian Freestyle medallist Artem Gebekov revelations. The 31-year-old Dagestan native says that due to high competition in the region athletes including wrestlers resort to faking documents and doping. “In a region where competition in a particular sport is so high that the republic’s championship is unofficially considered along with the world championship, there is often a place for illegal unsportsmanlike activities. Such, for example, as a fake of documents or the use of doping. With regards to doping, however, everything in our country is more or less clear (doping scandals against Russian athletes), and falsification of documents was a more local problem that existed in Dagestan for several years in a row,” he told the Russian media.
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Parents in the North Caucasus region do not register their child after its birth. They only do it after two or three years. This way they fake the age of the infant. “When a child is born in the trainer’s family, he was not registered, documents were made only after two or three years. The father knew that his son would become a fighter,” he added.
But the government has brought in strict laws to curb the practice. However, even people have become sly. Eyewitnesses say that many young athletes would lose their passport, and then apply for a new one with a new age which would be less by a couple of years.
“It always was, they tried to fight it, but the children faked their years. Now it has come to the point that where there are children who are mowed down to five years, and their peers who grew up with them know about this,” the 61kg weight division wrestler said.
Gebekov is not the first wrestler to point out the age cheating problem in wrestling. In 2017, the great Aleksandr Karelin said that the problem is destroying the whole ideology of wrestling. “Because of this, catastrophic consequences await our national teams. Sometimes athletes come to youth tournaments five or six years older than their declared age. How can you let a 14-year-old wrestle a 20-year-old? This is a different physical state, completely different psychology”. “Now Imagine a 20-year-old athlete who fights among young men, up to 24 years old, and then graduates into the senior level. After going through all those competitions, this fighter has been turned into slag. This is an ugly phenomenon that makes us unable to compete,” he added
