It might have been easier if it had happened to a less popular player (and I genuinely have no-one in mind). Some things just gain more attention if there’s a villain involved.
Jannik Sinner is recognised as being a very wholesome young man. He’s 23, he understands his obligations to tennis, he gives credit to opponents, and the consoling arm he put round Alexander Zverev after the recent Australian Open final was genuine. I’ve interviewed Sinner and find him a lovely guy. Tennis is truly lucky that its two new icons at the top of the men’s game – Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz – are model human beings.
And yet, the ‘arrangement’ by which Sinner has ‘accepted’ a three-month suspension from tour tennis, backdated to 9 February, leaves no winners, only losers. The biggest loser is the sport of tennis, in fact I wonder whether there’s any point in having an anti-doping programme if this is how the system can be gamed. I don’t mean that literally – the thought of having no restrictions on performance-enhancing substances is horrendous, but perception is everything, and the perception of tennis is a drug-free sport has been badly tarnished.
Dull and tedious though it is, it’s important to understand the legal detail in the Sinner case to see why it’s so problematical.
The circumstances of the case are uncontested. One could argue they shouldn’t be – after all, the idea that a top player should have a banned substance in his body (albeit miniscule traces of it) because his masseur gave him a bare-hand massage after treating a finger cut with an ointment that had the substance (clostebol) in it sounds far-fetched. But both the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) accepted that, and as the tennis world believes Sinner did not set out to cheat, we can take it as read.
So what was at issue? A situation where a player has a banned substance given unknowingly by an entourage member has never come up before, so the ITIA had no precedent to work with when it decided last year that Sinner deserved no suspension. Wada contested the ITIA’s decision, saying it disrespects the principle that a player is responsible for what is in his/her body, and a player is responsible for anything a member of their entourage gives them.
Blown out of the water
The hearing that was set for 16 April at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) was to decide which of the past precedents were most relevant to Sinner’s case. Nothing emulates it completely, but should he have no ban, should he have a four-week ban like Iga Swiatek had for taking a substance that proved to be contaminated, should it be 15 months like Maria Sharapova had for continuing to take a substance she had used for years but which she didn’t notice had been added to the banned list, or should it be the full 24 months because there are no mitigating circumstances?
That was the precedent Cas was due to set, but all that has been blown out of the water by the ‘arrangement’ under which Sinner has ‘accepted’ a three-month ban that will see him miss no Grand Slam tournaments, and not even the biggest tournament on Italian soil. I sensed something like this might happen, indeed I’d cynically told a couple of friends that Sinner might get a one-month ban starting on 14 July, the day after Wimbledon ends. OK, so it’s three months, but in a similar convenient gap in the calendar where he loses nothing substantial; if anything, he gains valuable rest time for a body that has been worked hard in recent months.
In civil litigation, parties are encouraged to settle out of court, indeed British law encourages it through rules on who pays the legal costs. But that is a different set of circumstances to a rule designed to ensure sport is both fair and seen to be fair. Yes, the anti-doping code allows for ‘arrangements’ to prevent a case going to court, but in cases like this, it feels like the convenience of the player has trumped the need for due process. That is why tennis is the loser.
I fear Sinner will also be a loser. If he wins Roland-Garros and/or Wimbledon, a plausible possibility given his form over recent months, will he get the credit? Will there be a constant chatter of ‘drug cheat’ in the background? There are already some saying he should be stripped of his 2025 Australian Open title. The ‘arrangement’ has not helped him.
In a broader context, tennis has bigger problems. It has become so physical that variety of playing styles is getting lost. I fear that if top-level tennis matches – both men’s and women’s – become one-dimensional battles of baseline blasting between super-fit athletes who can go into ice baths and other modern inventions to recover unnaturally quickly from their exertions, it will eventually kill the attractiveness of the sport.
Yet for that very reason, it’s vital that performance-enhancing substances remain banned. It’s already difficult to keep them out, and we mustn’t allow a situation to develop where a player could be maliciously contaminated (perhaps by a rival) and have no defence. But allowing a world number one who has a performance-enhancing substance in his body to get off without any meaningful sanction, and for the precedent to emerge in an ‘arrangement’ rather than a legal hearing, is not going to help.