India’s anti-doping structure has been expanded again, with two prominent T20 World Cup winners now added to the National Anti-Doping Agency’s Registered Testing Pool for the second quarter of 2026. Abhishek Sharma and Axar Patel have been brought into the updated list, and they replace Smriti Mandhana and Shreyas Iyer, whose names no longer appear in this round of changes. The revised RTP now includes 348 athletes across multiple disciplines, and cricket continues to be one of the sport categories represented, with 14 players included.
The significance of the update is less about any suggestion of wrongdoing and more about what membership in the RTP actually entails. Athletes named in the pool are placed under a stricter anti-doping compliance regime. They are required to submit regular whereabouts information, detailing where they will be training, living, and competing, and they must remain reachable during a fixed, daily one-hour window so they can be selected for testing. Under the World Anti-Doping Agency framework, an anti-doping rule violation can be triggered when an athlete accumulates three missed tests and/or filing failures within a 12-month period.
Abhishek Sharma and Axar Patel join the tighter testing bracket
For Indian cricket, the latest RTP revision underlines how quickly a player’s monitoring status can change within the national anti-doping system. Abhishek Sharma and Axar Patel are now among the cricketers required to meet the heightened testing and reporting responsibilities that come with RTP inclusion. Their entry follows the earlier cycle in which Smriti Mandhana and Shreyas Iyer had featured, before being removed from the list for the second quarter of 2026. In the first quarter of 2026, the RTP had 347 athletes, and the cricket additions at that point had included Mandhana along with Jemimah Rodrigues.
Even with the change in personnel, the overall cricket line-up remains broadly familiar. The updated pool still lists several key men’s players, including Shubman Gill, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Hardik Pandya, Rishabh Pant, Jasprit Bumrah, KL Rahul, Arshdeep Singh, and Tilak Varma. On the women’s side, Deepti Sharma, Shafali Verma, and Renuka Singh Thakur continue to be included. With Abhishek Sharma and Axar Patel now added, the total number of cricketers in the latest RTP stands at 14.
The cricket portion of the update sits within a far wider anti-doping landscape. Athletics remains the most heavily represented discipline in the RTP, and its presence has grown from 118 athletes in the first quarter list to 134 in the latest version. That shift points to where the strongest testing emphasis currently sits, even though cricket tends to draw the most attention when well-known international and award-winning names appear in the register. Earlier reporting ahead of 2026’s major events had already highlighted that the agency was widening its focus, with NADA increasing the overall pool size compared to the previous cycle.
So while the inclusion of Abhishek Sharma and Axar Patel is not being framed as a disciplinary development, it is still a meaningful administrative step. Both players are now placed under a more demanding, year-round anti-doping regime, and the move also reflects NADA’s continuing push to maintain closer oversight of India’s top athletes across different sports. In day-to-day terms, it translates into additional compliance duties, more stringent expectations around availability, and a spot within the country’s top-priority testing group.
