(Melbourne) ATP boss Andrea Gaudenzi estimated on Friday that the doping affair in which world No.1 Jannik Sinner has been entangled since the summer of 2024 had been managed “in accordance with the rules of the art”, despite criticism of the privileged treatment from which the Italian, who insisted he was innocent, would have benefited.
Posted at 11:17 p.m.
“I am 100% sure that there was no preferential treatment,” said the president of the ATP, which manages the men’s professional circuit, in an interview with the Australian news agency AAP.
“The procedure was conducted according to the rules of the art and in accordance with the regulation by the International Agency for Tennis Integrity (Itia),” insisted the Italian.
Testing positive for clostebol (an anabolic) in March, Sinner did not receive any suspension and only saw his case revealed in the summer of 2024 by Itia.
At the end of December, Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic regretted the lack of “transparency and the inconsistency of protocols”, stressing that other players caught in doping cases had been waiting “for more than a year for their case to be resolved “.
The World Anti-Doping Agency, also dissatisfied, appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and demands a suspension of one to two years for Sinner, who is about to begin the defense of his title at the Open d ‘Australia.
“I did nothing wrong,” the world No.1 repeated Friday at a press conference. Asked about the date on which the CAS would issue its decision, Sinner said he did not know it.
“We are at a stage where we don’t know much. Of course I think about it,” he said in Melbourne in reference to this doping affair.
“But things are as they are, I’m here to try to prepare for this Grand Slam. We’ll see how it goes,” added the Italian, whose results have so far hardly been affected by this affair.
More broadly, “we’ll see what I can accomplish this year. “It’s a question that I don’t think any of us can answer,” Sinner told reporters.
If Djokovic, winner of 24 Grand Slam tournaments, said he believed Sinner when he assured that he had tested positive for clostebol following contamination by his physiotherapist, he claimed to have “been very frustrated, like most of the other players, for having been kept in the dark for five months.”
Sinner “received the news (of the positive tests) in April and the announcement was not made until August, just before the US Open. The ATP hasn’t really spoken in depth about why they kept this matter away from the public,” he lamented.
For Andrea Gaudenzi, “there was a lot of false information”. The ATP boss says he only learned of Sinner’s doping affair “two days before the Itia announcement – as it should be”.
“I was a little shocked at first. (But Itia) is completely independent and it turned to an independent tribunal” to make its decision, he insisted.
Even if Sinner was suspended, “I think he will survive and we will survive.” Tennis is a very solid product,” he concluded.
