At the heart of the doping case against Jannik Sinner, the world’s top-ranked tennis player, is an existential debate about the monitoring of performance-enhancing drugs in sport.
Is the primary goal to catch cheaters and prevent athletes from gaining unfair advantages over their peers? What happens when World Anti-Doping Code enforcers see violations but uniformly agree that an athlete has not gained or pursued such an advantage?
Many athletes have found themselves in the middle of this debate, and now it’s the two-time Grand Slam champion’s turn, as one anti-doping agency has taken another anti-doping agency to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
Apologies to anyone who is allergic to the alphabet soup of sports bureaucracy.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has appealed a ruling by an independent panel set up by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA), which found that the 23-year-old had “no fault or negligence” after he twice tested positive for Clostebol. The anabolic steroid is on the WADA list of prohibited substances. The committee still found that he committed two anti-doping rule violations.
The World Anti-Doping Agency said in a statement that it is not seeking to overturn any of Sinner’s results, with the exception of his qualification to the semifinals at the BNP Paribas Open, which was held in Indian Wells, California (those results were already excluded in the decision shared by WADA anti-doping). etia).
She objects to dismissing any blame attributable to Sinner, which she says “was not valid under the established rules.”
WADA therefore accepts the final ruling that Sinner did not intentionally dope, but is still asserting its credibility by seeking to change the terms of that ruling.
Sinner, who recently won the US Open, could be banned from tennis for one to two years if WADA wins.
Go deeper
The World Anti-Doping Agency is seeking to impose a ban of up to two years in Jannik Sinner’s appeal case
Sinner was informed of his positive tests in late March. He tested positive for the coastball on March 10, at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., and again on March 18, between that tournament and the Miami Open, ITIA said. The results carried a mandatory temporary suspension, which Sinner appealed.
In each appeal, and at the final hearing on August 15, three separate independent tribunals convened by ITIA and administered by Sport Solutions, an arbitration firm, accepted the Italian world No. 1’s explanation for the positive tests. Physical therapist Umberto Ferrara brought Trofodermin, an over-the-counter therapeutic spray containing Clostebol, to Indian Wells. The physiotherapist, Giacomo Naldi, cut his hand and used a spray on the cut. Naldi then performed massages on Siner, which resulted in contamination from the substance found on Naldi’s skin reaching Siner’s skin.
Go deeper
Jannik Sinner built the team that made him No. 1 in the world, and then he blew it up
These court decisions meant that Sinner first avoided two temporary suspensions and then, at the final hearing, a “period of ineligibility”, which would have been a fearsome and reputation-damaging ban. The two successful initial appeals also meant that his case remained private until the final hearing, under ITIA protocol.
At the final hearing, the independent court ruled that Sinner was not at fault for the positive tests. She said he received no benefit from Clostbol, an old and notorious doping drug that East Germany used as part of its state-sponsored doping programs in the 1970s and 1980s.
Professor David Cowan, a member of the tribunal who explained the ruling, said: “Even if the administration was deliberate, the minutes likely to have been applied would have had no doping or performance-enhancing effect on the player.”
However, due to the presence of Clostipol in his system, Sinner was found to have committed an anti-doping violation, which resulted in him being stripped of ranking points, prize money and results from the Indian Wells Championship. But she did not ask for comment.
After six months of playing under a cloud of secrecy, Sinner won the US Open, the first tournament after the ITIA announced the case and final ruling.
But three weeks later, on Saturday, the World Anti-Doping Agency announced its appeal against that ruling. The case now moves to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is the final arbiter in sports doping cases.
Jannik Sinner is currently playing in Beijing, at the China Open. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
The sinner is not very pleased. In a statement issued on Saturday, Sinner noted that he had already gone through three separate hearings that confirmed that he did not intentionally violate the rules or compete unfairly.
“I understand that these matters need to be thoroughly investigated to preserve the integrity of the sport we all love,” he said. “However, it is difficult to see what would be achieved by asking a different set of three judges to consider the same facts and documents again.”
Sinner and WADA now find themselves in difficult territory. Since the ITIA announcement, Sinner has faced indirect criticism — some of which was more insulting than unverifiable — over perceptions of preferential treatment. Tennis is a sport with double standards, from better court allocation and higher appearance fees for higher-ranked players, to tennis authorities’ keener attention to the sport’s biggest issues. Sinner, ranked No. 1 in the world, has stronger and more accessible legal resources than most tennis players in a similar situation.
While in other anti-doping cases players have been provisionally suspended for several months during the investigation, the so-called silence on his case was not an element of preferential treatment, instead adhering to the ITIA investigation process.
Other Italian tennis players who tested positive for the same substance used by Sinner were suspended and wrongly convicted. Stefano Battaglino, another Italian tennis player, received a four-year ban in 2023. Battaglino failed to prove that his positive test for Clostebol was unintentional after it was discovered during a random drug test at an ITF event in Tunisia.
Jannik Sinner lost to Carlos Alcaraz in the semifinals in Indian Wells, where the first positive test was recorded. (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)
This is one of the most complex factors. Italy has a widespread and easily recognized problem with athletes testing positive for clostebol, because it is freely sold in the country as an ingredient in therapeutic products — including the drug Trofodermin that Ferrara brought to Indian Wells. The World Anti-Doping Agency reported that about half of the cases of positive Clostbol tests come from the country.
Meanwhile, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is dealing with the fallout from its decision not to investigate 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for the same heart drug seven months before the Tokyo 2021 Olympics. The swimmers were allowed to compete, and several athletes won medals. The agency said in its statement on the case, issued in April 2024 after what it called “some misleading and potentially defamatory media coverage,” that it was “not in a position to refute the possibility that contamination was the source” of the positive result. Tests.
Travis Tygart, head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and a key figure in the cases of Lance Armstrong in cycling and Alberto Salazar in track, on Saturday linked their position to WADA’s decision regarding Sinner.
“It is inconceivable that WADA leaders would appeal this case when the rules are clearly being followed in tennis, but they do nothing when China sweeps 23 positive tests under the rug, indisputably violating the rules,” Tygart said.
“Since athletes are held to high standards by anti-doping authorities, it is time for decision-makers at WADA to be too.”
WADA responded to this statement by criticizing Tygart. “It is strange for Mr. Tegart to comment on a case when he is not involved in it, has not reviewed the file and does not have all the facts. “It is also strange that he would compare it to a completely unrelated case in which he was not involved and does not have the facts,” said James Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the World Anti-Doping Agency. “It may be more beneficial for Mr. Tygart to spend his time working on anti-doping problems in the United States rather than constantly commenting on what is happening elsewhere in the world.”
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) acknowledges that detection of Clostebol has been greatly enhanced in recent years thanks to technological advances that have made it possible to detect lower concentrations.
This has helped discover some cases of doping, especially when it comes to new substances that are difficult to detect. But it also led to the arrest of innocent athletes who, judging by the levels of a particular substance detected, were not doping — at least not with the substance that led to a positive test result.
The World Anti-Doping Agency’s rules, in this case, appear to still be keeping pace with the progress they have made in testing, creating an imbalance between science and administration as athletes see their careers and reputations at stake.
(Top image: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
