Asian Games gold medallist compound archer Prathamesh Jawkar will be banned from the sport for two years, starting Sunday, April 19, after he accepted the punishment for a whereabouts failure.
According to Article 2.4 of the World Anti-Doping Code, three filing failures regarding the athlete’s whereabouts within a 12-month period culminates into an Anti-Doping Rule Violation. Jawkar missed the deadline for three filings last year, which means he will not only be able to defend his gold at this year’s Asian Games but also most likely miss out on the 2028 Olympics.
“The notice that I received from ITA (International Testing Agency) was on January 14 this year. They gave me a week to explain myself and they were going to reassess my case if I had some evidence in my favour. I gave my explanations about why I failed to fill in the whereabouts, but the reasons were clearly not valid enough. On March 31, I received the final notice of charge,” Jawkar told Sportstar.
“In January only I got to know like there’s no way I’m getting out of this. I was just hoping that they would reduce the period of the ban to maybe a year. I talked with the lawyers and in my case, I don’t think I can get away with these mistakes. I just have to accept it,” he added when asked whether he could appeal this decision.
Jawkar has been part of the Registered Testing Pool (RTP) since 2023 and he had been duly filling the whereabouts up until 2025. He conceded that a lack of education on his part played a role in these failures, especially when he temporarily changed his discipline to recurve.
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“I didn’t have enough knowledge regarding this. I was not briefed when I got introduced to the testing tool. It all happened online. Even if I had received a call or something to explain the importance of it, I would have made sure I did. I thought my shift to recurve was quite public, World Archery (first posted about it on March 20) had interviewed me as well. So I thought they must know that I no longer compete at the world level. So why would they test me? At the time I thought I didn’t need to fill it,” Jawkar explained.
According to the Athletics Integrity Unit, an athlete has to follow four deadlines in a year: March 15, June 15, September 15, December 15.
Jawkar’s second offence came when his whereabouts were under doubt. “In July, there was a period of 10 or 15 days when I didn’t know whether I would be in India or Italy because the visa procedure was delayed. I was going to Europe for training. I filled the majority of my variables but I explained my case, saying how I was unsure about these dates. That’s why I’d kept that bit blank. But I didn’t fill it by the deadline. When I got the chance to plead my case, I had a letter from Sports Authority of India my visa actually got delayed. Those were circumstances out of my hands.”
The third offence, Jawkar said, occurred during a period when he had switched off all notifications on his phone, which meant he missed any and all alerts or emails which may have come his way.
This ban means he won’t be able to get into coaching if he wanted to. “I don’t do anything else other than this (archery). I’m going to continue training, study a bit. And then I’m going to try to bounce back because this is my dream,” Jawkar, who’s completing a B.Sc in Zoology, said dejectedly.
“I hope that if someone is a medal prospect for the Olympics or Asiad, they learn from this mistake because it’s just like sheer negligence on my part. I should have taken an effort to educate myself on this,” the 22-year-old concluded.
Published on Apr 19, 2026