“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.
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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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