Doping, why ruling Halep could play against Sinner

The 2024 of tennis will go down in history as the year of Jannik Sinner, no doubt about it, doping arbitration permitting. Because there is one precedent that doesn't exactly make the from Sesto Pusteria rest easy: the one concerning the Romanian tennis player Simona Halep, winner at Roland Garros in 2018 and Wimbledon in 2019, number 1 in the Atp Ranking for almost a year and yet disqualified for "careless use of a contaminated supplement".

In the motivations of the ruling issued by the Swiss arbitrators there is more than one element to understand the reasons for Wada's appeal on the acquittal by Sinner's Itia. "The athlete we are judging today," it reads, "is not just a professional tennis player: she is highly experienced, has been at the top of the world rankings for some time and has won two slams... In using the product that caused her to test positive for doping, she relied entirely on her personal physiotherapist, who is not a doctor or clinician... The question that this TAS Panel is asking is why in such a highly professional environment issues related to possible problems with anti-doping are entrusted to people who have no experience in this area... The athlete should have understood the limits of his physiotherapist's qualifications and the fact that he was playing a tournament in the United States, on a continent far from his own, cannot justify not consulting a specialist and entrusting such a delicate task to a person without the necessary medical expertise'.

Admittedly, we are talking about very different case histories (in Halep's case a supplement is under indictment, in Sinner's case an ointment that treats injuries: the level of risk and awareness was undoubtedly higher for the Romanian tennis player), but Tas strongly emphasises that it is inconceivable for a top athlete to delegate the use of products with a risk of positivity to people who have no medical expertise such as physiotherapists or coaches. If the concept were extended to the staff accompanying Sinner to Florida last March, the arbitration could play out on this factor as well.