Sinner and his lawyers play system like a Stradivarius by negotiating three-month ban

We did not have long to wait. News of Jannik Sinner’s negotiated three-month ban dropped at around 9.30am on Saturday morning, 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 late winter and early spring, 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 him 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.

You might remember Tyson Fury coming 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 morning, saying that a talented teenager had given a positive test and spent a year and £20,000 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.

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 which 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.

Sinner handed three-month doping ban

World No 1 Jannik Sinner has negotiated a three-month ban for last year’s doping offences, which will begin immediately and thus enable him to play all four majors this season.

An investigation by the International Tennis Integrity Agency had originally found Sinner to bear no fault or negligence for the presence of clostebol – a banned steroid – in two urine tests he gave in March last year.

The verdict was then appealed against by the World Anti-Doping Agency. Setting a hearing date of April 16-17 at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, a Wada spokesman said last week that it would be pressing for a ban of one to two years.

Most observers expected the Cas hearing to reach a compromise, downgrading “no fault or negligence” to “no significant fault or negligence”, and thus handing Sinner a short ban that would eliminate him from both the French Open and Wimbledon while allowing him to return for the autumn events.

Hence the move from Sinner’s camp to pre-emptively negotiate a ban which would rule him out of the less-significant part of the tennis season, while leaving him free to play in the marquee tournaments.

In a statement released by his lawyers, Sinner said: “This case had been hanging over me for nearly a year and the process still had a long time to run with a decision maybe only at the end of the year.

“I have always accepted that I am responsible for my team and realise Wada’s strict rules are an important protection for the sport I love. On that basis, I have accepted Wada’s offer to resolve these proceedings on the basis of a three-month sanction.”

Sinner’s team appear to have pulled off a masterstroke here, which is likely to extend last year’s grumbling about supposed “preferential treatment”. His original positive tests were kept secret between March and August on the grounds that his lawyers had successfully challenged the provisional suspension within the prescribed 10-day window.

To recap, the explanation given for the presence of clostebol was that Sinner’s then fitness trainer, Giacomo Naldi, had cut his finger on a scalpel in his own kit-bag, and then used an over-the-counter spray containing the steroid to treat the wound. When Naldi then gave Sinner a massage, small amounts of the chemical were transferred into Sinner’s body.

Because this explanation was accepted immediately by the ITIA, Sinner’s positive tests were not disclosed into the public domain until the verdict emerged in August that he bore no fault or negligence.

Some other players – most loudly Nick Kyrgios – cried foul over this lack of transparency, and their complaints only grew louder when women’s No 1 Iga Swiatek was eventually revealed to have served a silent ban for trimetazidine in late September and early October. After news of Sinner’s ban broke, Kyrgios said on social media: “So Wada come out and say it would be a one-two year ban. Obviously Sinner’s team have done everything in their power to just go ahead and take a three-month ban, no titles lost, no prize money lost. Guilty or not? Sad day for tennis. Fairness in tennis does not exist.”

Locker-room discontent reached such a point that, in the days before January’s Australian Open, the ITIA held two briefing sessions with coaches and agents to – in the words of a spokesperson – “run through the recent cases, lay out the facts and answer questions”.

“It is historically unusual for any provisional suspension appeal to be successful,” the spokesperson added, “so two in quick succession is extremely rare.”

While Wada did not dispute Sinner’s explanation of events, it launched an appeal on the grounds that a complete exculpation would create a damaging precedent.

In an interview published by the Italian newspaper La Stampa this week, Wada spokesperson James Fitzgerald said: “The principle of strict liability is of fundamental importance to upholding fairness in sport. Without it there would be no anti-doping and the dopers would win.”

From a tennis perspective, Sinner’s move is embarrassing for the regular ATP Tour. It demonstrates how the leading players consider their careers to be defined almost exclusively by their performances at the four majors. The intervening events are for providing match practice, earning an income, and gathering the rankings points that shore up their seedings.

Indeed, Sinner could even benefit from a break from the hurly-burly. The disadvantage of playing 35 weeks of the year is that it leaves little time for physical training blocks or technical fine-tuning. Sinner will now be able to invest in both while his rivals continue to ride the ATP carousel. And with a 3,000-point lead at the head of the rankings chart, he is unlikely to lose his No 1 status either.

All in all, Sinner and his team have given a masterclass in handling a potentially disastrous scenario. When he returns from his three-month ban – which runs from February 9 to May 4 – he will be able to play the final clay court build-up event in Rome and then go straight into the French Open as one of the favourites.

In a statement, the world anti-doping body said: “Wada accepts that Mr Sinner did not intend to cheat, and that his exposure to clostebol did not provide any performance-enhancing benefit and took place without his knowledge as the result of negligence of members of his entourage.

“However, under the Code and by virtue of Cas precedent, an athlete bears responsibility for the entourage’s negligence. Based on the unique set of facts of this case, a three-month suspension is deemed to be an appropriate outcome.”

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