JANNIK SINNER GOT AWAY WITH SINS WHEN FERNANDO TATIS — AND OTHERS — DID NOT
In a sports industry that buries athletes on steroids, the young tennis star wasn’t suspended and begins this week as the No. 1 seed for the U.S. Open, though he tested positive twice with Clostebol
He picked the wrong town, as a Sinner who sinned. It wasn’t long ago when New York fans sat in Yankee Stadium and torched an opposing athlete, Fernando Tatis Jr., who used performance-enhancing drugs. “Steroids! Steroids! Steroids!” they chanted from the bleachers as he played right field for San Diego.
His violation? Tatis used Clostebol, a banned anabolic steroid he claimed to take for a contagious skin disease. “It turns out that I inadvertently took a medication to treat ringworm that contained Clostebol,” he said. “I should have used resources available to me in order to ensure that no banned substances were in what I took. I failed to do so.”
He was suspended 80 games by Major League Baseball for his ringworm “itching.”
Jannik Sinner tested positive twice for Clostebol. He was not suspended by the International Tennis Integrity Agency, which angered some of his colleagues — and, probably, Tatis — while arousing suspicions of sports followers everywhere. Sinner is the No. 1 seed for the U.S. Open, which begins Monday, as he tries to win his second Grand Slam tournament of the season. Is he being protected by a sport that knows he’s a vital part of a future that features Carlos Alcaraz and needs a 23-year-old rival from Italy, whose face is seen throughout Europe for product endorsements?
The rowdy fans won’t care in Flushing Meadows, but an ITIA investigation blamed Sinner’s careless trainers for the crime. A fitness coach brought healing spray to a March event in Indian Wells, which came after Sinner won the Australian Open, and a physiotherapist cut himself with a knife while tending to Sinner’s callouses. A tribunal decided Giacomo Naldi “did not check the contents of the spray or see that present on the label of the canister was Clostebol.” That led a scientific expert to conclude Sinner wasn’t aware of a steroid when his feet were sprayed.
“Even if the administration had been intentional, the minute amounts likely to have been administered would not have had any relevant doping, or performance enhancing, effect upon the player,” professor David Cowan said.
Gee, why didn’t Tatis think of that? Or Simona Halep, who was banned nine months from women’s tennis after an original four-year suspension? “No fault or negligence,” came the Sinner ruling.
For decades, athletes in baseball and throughout sport have been ruined by steroids findings. Also in New York, Alex Rodriguez appeared Saturday at Yankee Stadium after lying about his steroids use, which prompted Derek Jeter to shrug when asked at Old Timers’ Day whether a massively suspended A-Rod should be honored in Monument Park. He told media members to ask owner Hal Steinbrenner or general manager Brian Cashman. “I don’t make those decisions, man,” Jeter said. “That’s the best way to put it. I know people are looking for headlines. I think you got Cashman here somewhere. I don’t even know if Cash makes that decision. I would call up Hal and see what he has to say. Don’t get me in the middle of it. That’s a Hal question.”
Yet Sinner catches a career-saving break. He fired the Clostebol twins, saying Friday, “Because of these mistakes, I’m not feeling that confident to continue with them. I was struggling a lot in the last months. Now I was waiting for the result, and now I just need some clean air.”
And that’s all? Find people who can read the canister label? Carry on with clean air and win 10 more majors? “It was a long process. I was always concerned that it might come out at some point,” Sinner said. “In the beginning it was a different view, but then after, you know, it was a little bit more complicated. I went through, me and my team and the lawyers. I’m just a simple tennis player.”
Tatis was the Face of Baseball when he was busted. Those days are long gone, with Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani owning the game. Sinner knows how some players are vilifying him, including Nick Kyrgios: “Ridiculous — whether it was accidental or planned. You get tested twice with a banned substance ... you should be gone for two years. Your performance was enhanced.”
“Different rules for different players,” Denis Shapovalov said. “Can’t imagine what every other player that got banned for contaminated substances is feeling right now.”
“This is ridiculous. Second-hand steroids through a massage?” Tennys Sandgren said. “ATP always looks out for their money-makers. Good for business, bad for transparency and integrity.”
“Maybe they should stop taking us for fools, no?” Lucas Pouille said.
Said Novak Djokovic, who plays in the other bracket and should face the Alcaraz-Sinner winner in the final: “There is a lot of issues in the system. We see a lack of standardized and clear protocols. I can understand the sentiments of a lot of players that are questioning whether they are treated the same. Hopefully the governing bodies of our sport will be able to learn from this case and have a better approach for the future. Collectively, there has to be a change, and I think that’s obvious.”
No fault or negligence? Sinner wins with big lawyers when average players lose. “Many players — without naming any of them, (as) I’m sure you know already who — have had similar or pretty much the same cases, where they haven’t had the same outcome,” Djokovic said. “And now the question is whether it is a case of the funds, whether a player can afford to pay a significant amount of money for a law firm that would then more efficiently represent his or her case. I don’t know. Is that the case or not? That’s something really I feel like we have to collectively investigate more.”
I happened to visit Indian Wells and saw Sinner’s first-round match. Who knew he was involved in steroids? The East Germans helped introduce Clostebol to the doping scene in the 1970s. More than 50 years later, the tennis bosses ignored it.
“I knew that I was very clean, and I knew that I was always very looking forward to be a fair player,” Sinner said. “It might change a couple of things, but whoever knows me very well knows what I haven’t done and I would never do something that goes against the rules. Obviously, it has been a very tough moment for me and my team. It still is, because it’s quite fresh.”
The last American male to win a major, Andy Roddick, blames Sinner for his choice of trainers in a podcast with Jon Wertheim. “I think it’s negligence by members of his team. I think it’s a gross mistake,” he said. “I don’t know how you can have anything like that near someone without having checked it out. The other thing, I’m going to throw his trainer completely under the bus. There was an Italian Basketball League, before he took the job with Jannik, someone got suspended for a year because their wife was using this spray, with that exact substance, and it got onto them.
“If you are in orbit, and know that happened, and it’s an easily-detectable substance, and you still have it on your finger — listen, I don’t know what that situation is. So tennis has probably the largest list of banned substances, comparatively speaking, to every other sport. Like, I can buy, stuff that you’ve had, athlete’s foot stuff that we can’t use. Sudafed we can’t use. Anything in a CVS that you walk in and get for any cold, 80 percent of it, we would probably test positive if we took it. So, two things — one, very stringent, something you have to think about. Two, not sure how this substance got anywhere near him.”
His people hardly are alone. Other trainers have made massive mistakes, too, but the athlete usually pays harshly because he controls his body.
This time, the No. 1 seed opens in front of a frothy crowd. He could play Americans in three of his first four matches and starts against Mackie McDonald. Alcaraz, clean as he is triumphant, would wait in the semifinals.
“In the end, it’s a very delicate subject,” Alcaraz said in Spanish. “It’s a very, very serious subject. There are things behind the scenes that many people don’t know, certainly that I don’t know. So in the end it’s very difficult, honestly, to talk about the subject. He tested positive, but there must be some reason why they let him continue playing that we don’t know. So I can’t talk much more about the subject either. In the end, they’ve declared him innocent and he’s in the tournament. I think there’s not much more to talk about and at least I don’t have much to say. It’s something that is talked about.”
In New York, someone is sure to chant it.
“Steroids!”
And then, “Sinner!”
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.