New Delhi: World Cup-winning cricketers Smriti Mandhana and Jemimah Rodrigues are among the high-profile additions to the National Anti-Doping Agency’s (NADA) Registered Testing Pool (RTP) for the first quarter of 2026. They are part an overall list that has been expanded significantly to 347 athletes.

In all, 120 athletes have been added to the previous RTP. Athletics accounts for most of the additions, 118 of them. The sharp rise in the numbers has been attributed to the build-up for this year’s Commonwealth Games and Asian Games, and India’s push for more stringent anti-doping measures.

India, for the third straight year, topped the global list of dope offenders as per the numbers released by the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) in their Testing Figures Report for 2024. A breakdown of the 260 Adverse Analytical Findings (AAFs) again puts the spotlight on athletics (76), weightlifting (43) and wrestling (29). A total of 148 AAFs from three disciplines alone means 57% of India’s dope offenders came from sports that have contributed 11 Olympic medals. Boxing (17) and kabaddi (10) also registered double-digit AAFs.

Athletes included in the RTP are required to submit detailed whereabouts information to NADA and remain available for testing within a specified time window every day. Three failures to provide accurate whereabouts information constitute a doping violation.

Athletics, which had 68 athletes in the previous RTP, has seen a marked increase in the list. Leading names such as steeplechaser Avinash Sable, 100m hurdler Jyothi Yarraji, decathlete Tejaswin Shankar and sprinter Animesh Kujur feature in the list for the first quarter. Sable returns to the NADA RTP after being excluded from the WADA list, which currently includes only javelin throwers Neeraj Chopra and Sachin Yadav from India.

There are 14 cricketers in the pool, with Smriti and Jemimah replacing T20 skipper Suryakumar Yadav and Sanju Samson, who both will feature in next month’s T20 World Cup. The other names are unchanged and include Test and ODI skipper Shubman Gill, his ODI deputy Shreyas Iyer, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Hardik Pandya, Rishabh Pant, Jasprit Bumrah, KL Rahul, Arshdeep Singh and Tilak Verma.

From the women’s team that won a historic ODI World Cup last November, Deepti Sharma, Shafali Verma and Renuka Thakur continue to feature in the list.

In hockey, senior India players Manpreet Singh, skipper Harmanpreet Singh, Amit Rohidas and Hardik Singh, women’s team captain Salima Tete, goalkeeper Savita Punia and Navneet Kaur are in the pool. It also has 25 Indian weightlifters and 29 wrestlers, including Paris Olympics bronze medallist Aman Sehrawat.