As has happened since the preamble to the last US Open and in all the tournaments he has played since then, Jannik Sinner lives under the unpleasant shadow of clostebol. Although the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) considered that there was no intention on the part of the Italian – investigated for half a year for the detection of the anabolic steroid in a sample collected in Indian Wells – and announced his exoneration, the World Anti-Dioping Agency appealed The decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and the Italian’s professional future has been up in the air since the end of September. The Italian maintains his innocence, but it is unknown what will happen. Now, we already know when the final ruling will be. As announced by the TAS, it will be communicated between April 16 and 17, coinciding with the next clay court tour.
WADA requests between one and two years of punishment for Sinner, who is tensely awaiting a resolution that will be decided “behind closed doors” after the hearing that will take place at the headquarters of the highest anti-doping authority in Lausanne. Meanwhile, the 23-year-old athlete mentally shields himself as best he can; Based on the results, wonderful. “I would be lying if I said that I have forgotten it or that I don’t think about it, because that is not the case. But I know exactly what has happened; I didn’t do anything wrong and that’s why I’m here playing. This has been with me for quite some time, but now I am trying to prepare well for this tournament,” indicates the number one, who will debut on Monday, like Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz.
According to several media reports, the person who will serve as president of the arbitration panel in Sinner’s case is former tennis player Jacques Radoux, a 55-year-old Luxembourger who competed between 1987 and 1997, and who rose to 458th place on the list. Between 2008 and 2013 he captained his country in the Davis Cup and later studied Law in France. The second representative of the CAS will be the Israeli Ken Kalo. Lawyer Jeffrey Benz will intervene on the player’s behalf. His mission will be to reinforce the argument initially raised by his client, who denied any voluntariness regarding the presence of the substance in his body and claimed that it was an accidental event, the result of a massage without gloves by his former physiotherapist. Giacomo Naldi, fired.
The amount found in the double control carried out during the Indian Wells tournament in March was 121 picograms per milliliter in the first control and 122 in the second. That is to say, a low record in the opinion of experts, but which could be the trail, experts point out, of a higher figure. From the ATP, its president, also Italian Andrea Gaudenzi, defends that there has been no “preferential treatment” for Sinner and that the organization has strictly followed the regulations.
