Perhaps the first thing to say about Iga Swiatek that’s because she didn’t take drugs deliberately. The report on his case clearly shows this. The bottle of melatonin tablets which his team identified as guilty was proven by independent laboratory testing to have come from a batch contaminated with the banned substance trimetazidine, small traces of which triggered its positive sample.
But then Tara Moore didn’t do drugs on purpose either. Not according to an independent tribunal, which concluded that the British doubles player was likely contaminated by meat eaten at a local restaurant when she tested positive for two banned substances, nandrolone and boldenone, during a tournament in Colombia in April 2022. Tellingly, Moore was one of three players among 21 tested at the tournament whose samples contained boldenone, an unqualified wave for a substance found in just 0.03%. samples around the world.
So why did Moore waste 19 months of her career, 600 ranking places and hundreds of thousands of pounds in a public battle to prove her innocence (and she continues to do so, with her case set to go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport). next year), while Swiatek received a one-month ban a few weeks after being tested in August, in a matter kept secret by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA)?
Another comparison can be made between Italian men Jannik sinnerthe world number 1 who escaped punishment after succeeding arguing that it had been inadvertently contaminated by his physiotherapist (the World Anti-Doping Agency is attractive against his no-fault verdict), and lower-ranking Stefano Battaglino, who tested positive for the same drug as Sinner – clostebol – and presented a similar defense argument. Battaglino was banned for four years.
Every case is nuanced and no two cases are the same, but perhaps the most glaring point of difference when reviewing these verdicts is that Sinner and Swiatek had the resources to quickly and effectively initiate action in court to defend himself, unlike Moore and Battaglino.
Expensive lawyers for five-time Grand Slam champion Swiatek and two-time Grand Slam winner Sinner successfully appealed their mandatory interim suspensions within 10 days of first learning their test results, meaning the cases do not should not have been publicly disclosed.
The two players then went to great lengths to explain the circumstances of their contamination. Sinner produced a detailed story involving a cut on his physical therapist’s finger and lesions on his massaged feet in order to explain how clostebol had entered his body. Swiatek has had its medications and supplements tested in the laboratory to identify the source of contamination.
Like most players, Moore was not very well equipped, responding to ITIA’s shot with the equivalent of a wooden racket. Certainly, her case was more complex, with the difficulty of proving exactly when and where she had eaten contaminated meat in the Colombian capital, Botafogo. Yet it took an extraordinary amount of time for her case to be heard, and it plunged her into financial peril.
‘I’m hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt,’ Moore said The times earlier this year. “Every time I play, it’s not just about winning or losing, it’s more about, ‘Can I pay?’ And I know there is still a long fight ahead of me.
After Swiatek’s case became public this week, German player Eva Lys tweeted: “What about the players who ate contaminated meat in South America? Why didn’t @TaraMoore92 get a one month suspension? I’m slowly starting to think that not everyone is entitled to the same process…there are a lot of lower ranked players who don’t get the same treatment as the “higher ranked” players. I’m not saying anyone is/or isn’t innocent, I’m saying everyone deserves equal opportunity.
Another difference between the tennis haves and have-nots is that Battaglino was using a physical therapist provided by the event he was attending when he tested positive for clostebol. So, even though Sinner was able to identify not only his personal team physical therapist, but also the offending product used, Battaglino’s efforts to contact the event physical therapist were unsuccessful. Without physical proof, he lost his fight.
As Novak Djokovic said in August following the Sinner case: “My understanding is that his case was closed the moment it was announced. But I think five or six months have passed since the news was broken to him and his team. So… I can understand the feelings of many players who wonder if they are being treated the same way.
“Many players, without naming any, I’m sure you already know who these players are, have had pretty much the same instances, where they didn’t have the same outcome, and now the question is if It’s a case of funds, if a player can afford to pay a significant amount of money to a law firm that would then represent their case more effectively.
“I don’t know, is this the case or not? This is something I think we need to collectively look at more… how we can standardize everything so that every player, regardless of their ranking, status or profile, can get the same type of treatment.
It is true that Sinner and Swiatek were able to defend themselves quickly and forcefully. They even managed to maintain control of their own narratives, with carefully prepared statements released alongside the ITIA verdict. But it is worrying to see that actors further down the food chain, involved in complex affairs, are falling behind. When Moore received her test results, she didn’t know what to do. “I always knew the truth, but this is incredibly scary. There is no manual.
Well, if contamination is so plausible, then maybe it should be. Not everyone can wield the same legal firepower as the world’s best players, but their high-profile cases have highlighted the inequality at the heart of tennis’ legal system, a system capable of harming athletes who he claims to serve.
