Tennis is under a giant doping cloud – viewers cannot believe what they are watching

Iga Swiatek tested positive for banned substance trimetazidine
Iga Swiatek tested positive for banned substance trimetazidine - Getty Images/Clive Brunskill

It felt, during Iga Swiatek’s seven-minute video mea culpa for a doping violation concealed for 2½ months, as if she were insulting everyone’s intelligence. “I want to be transparent with you,” she said. A little late for that: in withdrawing from three successive tournaments this autumn, the Pole had given three different explanations, all of which were economical with the truth. First she cited fatigue, then she referred to “personal matters” and finally she blamed a split from her long-time coach.

The bleaker reality was that all along, she had been seeking desperately to have a provisional suspension overturned and to establish how trimetazidine, a heart medication on the banned list, had found its way into her system.

TMZ, as it is more commonly known, is not a trivial drug. It is the same substance for which 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive ahead of this summer’s Paris Olympics, and which caused teenage Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva to be banned for four years. Now we learn that Swiatek, a five-time major champion, has fallen foul of it, too.

This alone is dispiriting enough, but what makes the episode doubly rotten is the fact that almost everybody outside her inner circle has been kept in the dark since September. As with the Jannik Sinner case, it seems that there is two-tier justice at work – that while the top players benefit from a controlled omerta, the rest find their reputations publicly trashed before having any chance to clear their names.

Credit: Iga.Swiatek/Instagram

Swiatek is convinced that now her transgression is global knowledge, she can head to Melbourne in January with a “clean slate”. Some hope. The Australian Open is billed as “the sunshine slam”, but rarely has tennis been under such a cloud. At a tournament meant to symbolise renewal, the men’s world No 1 and the women’s world No 2 will both arrive with their images besmirched.

The sport is in the extraordinary situation where Sinner could win back-to-back Australian titles and then be sanctioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which is looking to ban him for between one and two years after the Italian twice returned positive tests for clostebol. But what if Swiatek is also victorious? How will tennis reasonably claim that viewers can believe what they are seeing?

Either sport is clean or the entire enterprise falls apart. You would think that tennis, shaken for months by the Sinner controversy, might understand this by now. And yet a statement by the Women’s Tennis Association does not inspire much confidence. “The WTA fully supports Iga during this difficult time,” it says. And then, further down: “The WTA remains steadfast in our support for clean sport.” Surely somebody in their PR department realises that the second of these sentiments should come first, and that the sanctity of tennis needs placing above one player’s wounded pride.

There is another fundamental problem with the sport’s handling of these situations. The reason that Sinner’s initially lenient treatment – a no-fault ruling, and zero penalty – provoked such outrage in Nick Kyrgios, Denis Shapovalov and others was that it appeared inconsistent. How could the world’s best player receive a free pass for clostebol when his compatriot Stefano Battaglino, who advanced the same explanation of a rogue masseur, was banned for four years? Was it because one was a major champion and the other a journeyman? Was it because one could afford the finest lawyers and the other was cast adrift?

Britain’s Tara Moore has more reason than most to feel aggrieved. She had her career interrupted for 19 months, and her ordeal made global knowledge, before she was able to convince the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) that her doping violations for nandrolone and boldenone could be traced to eating the meat of steroid-dosed cattle. If she was angry about Sinner’s easy escape, she was positively boiling about Swiatek serving only a month’s suspension with nobody being any the wiser. “Players are afraid of the institutions that are supposed to protect us,” she says.

Tara Moore lost 19 months of her career as a result of a doping violation
Tara Moore lost 19 months of her career as a result of a doping violation - PA/John Walton

Swiatek might have become a four-time French Open winner by the age of 23, but she has not covered herself in glory here. She pulled out of the Korea Open because she said she was tired, out of the China Open because she was battling “personal matters”, and out of the Wuhan Open because she was supposedly too disorientated by a coaching change. Not one of those justifications would meet most people’s definition of “transparent”.

Her attention to detail in anti-doping protocols is not up to much either. The documented reason for her failure to disclose her melatonin medication – the source of the TMZ – on her forms? That she was “tired”. While the ITIA admitted they found this “unsatisfactory”, they accepted it regardless.

As with Sinner, there are suggestions of double standards. How, you might ask, is it possible for Swiatek to receive only a one-month ban while Czech Nikola Bartunkova, the Wimbledon girls’ finalist, is given six? Both had positive readings for TMZ. Both convinced tribunals that the contamination had been inadvertent. The crucial difference, according to the latest ruling, was that Swiatek “reasonably perceived a lower-degree of risk of contamination due to the higher regulatory standards for medicines in the European Union.”

Good luck convincing her sceptics that this was how she wriggled off six times as lightly. In tennis, the lead actors and the chorus line inhibit two vastly different worlds.