By Richard Pagliaro | @Tennis_Now | Friday, November 29, 2024
Photo credit: Ryan Pierse/Getty
Thanksgiving day is turkey day in the U.S.
This year, tennis is cooked says Nick Kyrgios.
Responding to the Thanksgiving Day news that five-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek has accepted a one-month suspension after testing positive for the banned substance trimetazidine (TMZ) in an out-of-competition sample last August, Kyrgios summer up the controversial 2024 season simply.
“Our sport is cooked,” Kyrgios posted on X.
Former world No. 1 Simona Halep, who won a shortened suspension from four years to nine months in a March ruling, slammed a perceived double standard of the Swiatek ruling.
Halep blasted the International Tennis Integrity Agency as “the organization that has done absolutely everything to destroy me despite the evidence” in a scathing social media post after the Swiatek announcement.
“I'm sitting and trying to understand, but it's really impossible for me to understand something like this. I stand and ask myself, why is there such a big difference in treatment and judgment?” Halep posted. “I can’t find [reason] and I don’t think there can be a logical answer. It can only be bad will from ITIA, the organization that has done absolutely everything to destroy me despite the evidence…
“I lost two years of my career, I lost many nights when I couldn’t sleep, thoughts, anxiety, questions without answers... but I won justice. It turned out that it was a contamination and that the biological passport was a pure invention.”
Former Wimbledon winner Halep is incensed that Swiatek’s explanation of her positive test caused by contamination was accepted, whereas Halep’s explanation of contamination was not accepted and she was initially hit with a four-year ban.
In a Thanksgiving Day announcement, the International Tennis Integrity Agency accepted that Swiatek’s assertion her positive test was caused by the contamination of a regulated non-prescription medication (melatonin), manufactured and sold in Poland that the player had been taking for jet lag and sleep issues. The ITIA accepted that the violation was therefore not intentional.
According to the ITIA, Swiatek’s level of fault was considered to be at the lowest end of the range for ‘No Significant Fault or Negligence’.
In Halep’s case, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled the two-time Grand Slam champion had "on the balance of probabilities” showed her positive test for a banned substance Roxadustat was unintentional and caused by a contaminated supplement as she claimed.
"Although the CAS Panel found that Ms. Halep did bear some level of fault or negligence for her violations, as she did not exercise sufficient care when using the Keto MCT supplement, it concluded that she bore no significant fault or negligence," the CAS said in its ruling.
As a result, the CAS lifted the ban enabling the Romanian superstar to return to tennis. Halep says the disparity in decisions between her case and Swiatek shows a double standard supporting her bold claim that “they wanted to destroy the last years of my career.
"They really wanted to destroy the last years of my career, they wanted something that I could never have imagined that could be wanted,” Halep posted on Instagram.
“I always believed in good, I believed in the fairness of this sport, I believed in goodness. It was painful, it is painful and maybe it will always be painful the injustice that was done to me.
“How is it possible that in identical cases that happened around the same time, ITIA has completely different approaches to my detriment. How could I accept that the WTA and the players' council did not want to give me back the ranking I deserved?!”
The WTA issued a statement of support for Swiatek and her assertion of contamination.
“The WTA fully supports Iga during this difficult time,” the WTA said in a statement. “Iga has consistently demonstrated a strong commitment to fair play and upholding the principles of clean sport, and this unfortunate incident highlights the challenges athletes face in navigating the use of medications and supplements.”
It’s the second time in three months a current or former world No. 1 major champion failed a doping test.
World No. 1 Jannik Sinner twice tested positive for the banned steroid clostebol last March. Sinner was not suspended because a tribunal found he bore “no fault” for the trace amounts of clostebol in his system.
Conceding he was “worried” he could be banned, Sinner said he was also confident he would be cleared because he believes the minute trace amounts of the banned substance clostebol in his system reinforce his claim of inadvertent contamination.
“Of course I was worried, because it was the first time for me, you know, and hopefully the last time that I am in this situation, position,” Sinner said. “There also a different part we have to see is the amount I had in my body, which is 0.000000001, so there are a lot of zeroes before coming up a 1.
“So I was worried, of course, because I'm always the player who was working very, very carefully in this. I believe I'm a fair player on and off the court.”
Similarly, In both cases, Kyrgios has criticized what he suggests is a two-tiered star system approach to doping consequences.
Ignorance is more than bliss, Kyrgios suggests, now it’s an escape clause.
In a social media post mocking both Swiatek and Sinner’s statements on how the substance entered their system, Krygios posted “the excuses that we can all use is that we just didn’t know…Professionals at the highest level of the sport can now just say ‘we didn’t know’.”