Jannik Sinner of Italy plays a backhand return to Alexander Zverev of Germany during the men’s singles final at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Jan. 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Asanka Brendon Ratnayake, File)
After Jannik Sinner accepted an immediate three-month ban in a settlement agreement with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), suspicions of favourable treatment about the timing of the suspension, making sure Sinner does not miss any Grand Slam tournaments, have been raised throughout the tennis world.
Leaping to its defence, WADA said on Wednesday that the kind of settlement is not unique to Sinner’s case. “We struck a case resolution agreement, which WADA has entered into 70-odd of these in the last four years,” Ross Wenzel, the chief counsel of WADA Tennis, told Reuters. “This is not something that is unique to the case of Mr Sinner. We’ve done it with athletes at all levels. The facts of this case are there for everyone to see and to read. We feel that we’ve been transparent in the way that we’ve handled it.”
Sinner failed two dope tests, testing positive for banned anabolic steroid clostebol, in March last year but was found “to bear no fault or negligence” by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) and escaped a ban after successfully appealing his case of accidental contamination. The 23-year-old Italian claimed that his physiotherapist used a cream to treat a cut on his finger that contained clostebol which was later found in his bloodstream due to transdermal contamination.
Even though Sinner was cleared, WADA filed an appeal with the Court for Arbitration for Sport (CAS) that was scheduled for April 16-17. The predetermined agreement has meant that Sinner will not miss any Majors, which may not have been the case even if he served a shorter ban as a result of the hearing at CAS.
Wenzel has claimed earlier that “this was a case that was a million miles away from doping” but WADA still felt it had a responsibility to file the appeal so that Sinner is held accountable for his team’s action.
“There was nothing.. it might be a complex factual scenario, but it was well substantiated and the science ruled out any sort of doping scenario,” he said.
Wenzel’s explanations will do little to suppress suspicion or convince Sinner’s peers who have felt hard done by anti-doping rulings in the past. 25-time Major winner Novak Djokovic said that the locker room has felt like unequal treatment has taken place.
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“It’s not a good image for our sport, that’s for sure. There’s a majority of the players that I’ve talked to in the locker room, not just in the last few days, but also last few months, that are not happy with the way this whole process (for Sinner) has been handled,” he said ahead of the ATP 500 event in Doha. “A majority of the players don’t feel that it’s fair. A majority of the players feel like there is favoritism happening. It appears that you can almost affect the outcome if you are a top player, if you have access to the top lawyers and whatnot.”
