By Simon Briggs
We did not have long to wait. News of Jannik Sinner’s negotiated three-month ban dropped at around 8.30pm (AEDT) on Saturday, and in less than an hour his chief critic Nick Kyrgios had weighed in. “Sad day for tennis. Fairness in tennis doesn’t exist.”
While Kyrgios is hardly to be regarded as an oracle on this highly technical subject, he does have a point. Sinner and his expensive team of lawyers have played the system like a Stradivarius.
The outcome is precisely the least damaging that it could have been. Three months off during the dog days of the tennis season, when there are no major tournaments at stake. In fact, one could argue that the World Anti-Doping Agency has done Sinner a favour, allowing the Australian Open champion to put his feet up – or, alternatively, work on the finer points of his kick-serve – while his rivals are exhausting themselves on the ATP treadmill.
Meanwhile, we hear of others – the British doubles player Tara Moore being a case in point – who cannot afford to mount a legal defence at all. Moore spent 19 months waiting for a resolution on her boldenone/nandrolone sample – which she blamed on contaminated Colombian beef – where Sinner’s lawyers had explained away his clostebol sample within a couple of days.
This is not to say that either party is innocent or guilty, merely that one had vastly more resources available than the other.
The negotiated aspect of this latest settlement only adds to the impression of favouritism. Who gets to negotiate with the big anti-doping agencies? Not the little people, for sure.
Boxer Tyson Fury came to an agreement with UK Anti-Doping in 2017, in which he accepted a backdated two-year ban for the nandrolone that he had supposedly ingested via eating uncastrated wild boar.
Compare that situation to the call I took from a member of a national tennis federation on Saturday night, saying that a talented teenager had given a positive test and spent a year and $40,000 trying to find the source – probably a contaminated supplement – without success. A four-year suspension is now a likely outcome.
“Sinner has a team around him, checking everything he takes,” said the administrator. “These are 17, 18-year-old kids, out on the tour with no money. They don’t have the advice these guys have. Their whole career is destroyed, and there’s tons of cases like this. It’s really not fair.”
The more time you spend observing the anti-doping set-up, the more you realise that it is a patchy and quixotic system, with numerous perverse outcomes and incentives.
Jannik Sinner with the spoils of victory – the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup – after his Australian Open win.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Even the role of the Court of Arbitration for Sport – which was supposed to have heard Sinner’s case on April 16-17 – is complicated by the fact that it is a commercial organisation. If CAS regularly reaches compromise settlements, which throw a bone to the appellant, could that be connected to its need to keep itself in business?
Perhaps we should not be too harsh on tennis, because it is at least coming up with verdicts against big-name players, despite all the reputational damage that results. There are other major sports that would prefer to avoid any negative publicity.
But the whole ecosystem often gives the impression of being held together with string and sticky tape. Sometimes one wonders whether the people collecting bans are truly the bad actors, or simply those who fell foul of the wrong bureaucratic rule.
The complexity involved in these cases can be bewildering. Look at the recent Simona Halep case involving roxadustat, which resulted in experts disagreeing over such fine details as the amount of sunlight that had reached the test tubes containing her blood samples.
Or look at the doping potential of synthetic peptides, treatments used by anti-ageing clinics which are still virtually impossible to detect.
Or look at the number of therapeutic-use exemptions (TUEs) which have been mentioned in the rash of recent tennis doping cases. Asthma treatments and thyroid medications both have the potential to deliver marginal gains.
You can understand the bewilderment of one former top-30 player I spoke to during last month’s Australian Open. “I never touched anything throughout my career,” they said, “and a lot of my most important defeats came on physical grounds. I look at all these TUEs and find myself wondering if I was an idiot for not working the system more effectively.”
Sinner’s case, then, plays into our wider sense of unease. Confusion and complexity are part of the territory. But one thing is clear: he has hacked his way through the anti-doping jungle, and come out with barely a scratch.
The Telegraph, London
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