Another doping case shook the Tennis world on Thursday. Former WTA world number one Iga Swiatek has been suspended for a month for testing positive for a banned substance, just two months after the suspension of men’s monarch Jannik Sinner was revealed to the public.
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The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) revealed on Thursday that the Pole had failed an out-of-competition test last August.
Trimetazidine was then found in his body. But in a press release, the ITIA specifies that the thesis of “contamination with a drug” was accepted. “The player’s degree of fault is the lowest on the spectrum,” we can also read.
The substance was in melatonin that the four-time French Open champion – now ranked second in the world – took for sleep problems and jet lag. The drug was produced and sold in his native Poland.
Eight days remaining
Given that it was, according to the ITIA, “unintentional” doping, Swiatek was suspended for one month. But she has already partly served her punishment: the one who dominated women’s tennis for almost two and a half years has already missed three tournaments, in September and October, including the WTA 1000 events in Beijing and Wuhan.
She will only have eight days left to serve, until December 4, while the women’s circuit is currently on pause awaiting the start of the next campaign. This means that she will not be able to train during this period.
At the time, the 23-year-old player cited personal reasons to explain these packages. On October 14, she was overtaken at the top of the world stage by Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka.
To improve endurance
But the Pole, five times Grand Slam champion, lifted the veil on the reasons for her absence, in a video published on social networks on Thursday.
“It was a shock to me,” she said of the positive test. This whole situation has made me very anxious. At first, I didn’t understand where it could come from. I found the situation unfair and the first weeks were chaotic.”
Trimetazidine, when consumed in sufficient quantities, can improve athletes’ endurance, according to CNN, and that is why it is banned.
One to two years required
But like Sinner, a sword of Damocles still hangs over Swiatek’s head. She remains under threat of an appeal from the Court of Arbitration for Sport of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) or from Polada, the Polish anti-doping agency.
WADA is currently studying the Italian’s case. In March, the world number one tested positive twice for clostebol, an anabolic steroid. This control was made public five months later, on the eve of the US Open, which he would win.
Photo AFP
The Italian appealed his suspensions to the ITIA, which were reduced to six days. The most dominant player of the last season, notably crowned champion of two major tournaments, Sinner had pleaded that the contamination was involuntary.
WADA, based in Montreal, is now asking that the player, also 23 years old, be suspended for one to two years.
– With AFP
