Two years ago Stefano Battaglino, a lowly ranked Italian tennis player, travelled to Morocco to play the M15 Casablanca, a second-tier World Tennis tournament. A journeyman’s journeyman, Battaglino’s best ranking was No760. During his first-round match against Matas Vasiliauskas, he called for a medical timeout and received a massage from a tournament physiotherapist.
Battaglino won 6-3, 6-0. Afterwards he was informed of the need to attend a random drug test. A month or so later, the examining laboratory reported the presence of the anabolic steroid clostebol in Battaglino’s urine. After the B-sample confirmed the original finding, the player was provisionally suspended and informed he may have committed a doping offence.
In his defence, Battaglino said he had never taken clostebol and couldn’t admit to an offence he didn’t commit. Trying to explain how trace levels of the drug could have got into his system, Battaglino suggested the cream used by the physiotherapist during that first-round match must have contained the drug. Scientists have shown the application of topical creams, containing a banned substance, can easily result in positive tests.
Being a player on tennis’s second-tier tour, Battaglino didn’t have the resources to mount much of a defence. He asked for the contact details of the Moroccan physio who had treated him but his calls went unanswered, his messages ignored. He couldn’t find any evidence to support his belief that the tournament physio had unwittingly used a cream containing clostebol.
They threw the kitchen sink at Battaglino. Four years. Outside of his family and friends, few noticed or cared.
Three months after Battaglino’s career had effectively been ended by the tennis authorities, Umberto Ferrara walked into Farmacia SS Trinita in Bologna and purchased a medical spray with the brand name Trofodermin. Though available over the counter in Italy, Trofodermin contains clostebol. Ferrara understood this because the packaging carried a clear warning, the word “doping” printed inside a red circle with a diagonal line through it.
Ferrara is Jannik Sinner’s fitness trainer. They’d been together for two years. Sinner is now tennis’s No1-ranked player. He has said part of the reason he hired Ferrara was because he had a university degree in pharmacology and understood the complexities of anti-doping. Three weeks after the Bologna purchase, Ferrara is with his boss at the Indian Wells Open in California.
Also part of Team Sinner at Indian Wells was the physiotherapist Giacomo Naldi. While there, Naldi says he reached into his washbag and accidentally cut a little finger on the scalpel he used to treat calluses on Sinner’s feet. He bandaged the finger and after a few days, Ferrara suggested he use the Trofodermin spray to help heal the cut. This is one of the therapeutic uses of the spray.
According to the physio, after spraying his finger he gave full-body massages to the player without washing his hands. Sinner was twice drug-tested in March at Indian Wells and both samples contained tiny amounts of clostebol. On April 17 Sinner was informed that he was provisionally suspended. On the same day his team made an urgent appeal against this decision. The provisional suspension was lifted.
Before an independent panel, Sinner, Ferrara and Naldi explained in some detail how the positive tests had come to pass. Through their eyes it was accidental contamination for which Sinner bore no responsibility. A layman, without Ferrara’s pharmacological background, would wonder why the fitness trainer would not have warned Naldi that he was treating his finger with a doping product and he needed to be careful.
Ferrara said he did warn his colleague but Naldi doesn’t recollect this. The independent panel thought it was possible that Naldi was jet-lagged at the time because he arrived into Indian Wells later than the others. The panel also surmised that perhaps he was distracted by family pressures. What is clear from the panel’s 33-page report is that the three adjudicators seemed disposed to give Sinner and his team the benefit of the doubt. Sinner, Ferrara and Naldi all said the physio cut his finger in Indian Wells but a friend of Sinner’s called Mr Gius remembered the cut as having happened at an entirely different location.
The panel accepted the accounts of the player, coach and physio. Mr Gius was not called upon to give evidence.
On his platform Honest Sport, the journalist Edmund Willison investigated the abuse of clostebol in Italian sport. “Over the past decade,” Willison wrote, “the drug has resurfaced in Italian football and across Italy’s wider sporting landscape. Between 2019 and 2023, 38 Italian athletes have tested positive for clostebol despite the fact it is scarcely produced in oral or injectable form by pharmaceutical companies.”
Last week at tennis’s US Open, fans seemed for the most part to be on Sinner’s side. His peers, less so. Sinner admitted to feeling some coolness in the locker room.
“Different rules for different players,” Canada’s Denis Shapovalov wrote on social media. “Can’t imagine what every other player that got banned for contaminated substances is feeling right now.” The French player Lucas Pouille said: “Maybe they should stop taking us for fools.” Nick Kyrgios went further: “Whether it was accidental or planned. You get tested twice with a banned [steroid] substance you should . . . be gone for two years.”
There is a sense that the ATP views its best players differently, though this may have as much to do with top players’ financial might as any desire to protect the biggest names.“This is ridiculous. Second-hand steroids through a massage? ATP always looks out for their money-makers. Good for business, bad for transparency and integrity,” the American player Tennys Sandgren said.
We cannot know if Battaglino knowingly used clostebol, nor if Sinner did. What we can say is that one was able to meticulously prepare his defence, the other wasn’t; one was given the benefit of the doubt, but not the other. The big guy escapes. The small guy feels the full force of anti-doping law. One law for the rich, another for the poor.
These are not good times for the anti-doping movement. In late June the US cleared the sprinter Erriyon Knighton of a doping violation in highly controversial circumstances, allowing him to compete at the Paris Olympics. This country did the same with the two-times Olympic gold-medal winner at taekwondo, Jade Jones, meaning she too could get to Paris. Then there were the 23 Chinese swimmers, testing positive and being cleared.
Such is the challenge of upholding positive tests that the global anti-doping movement has to sing from the same sheet. Alas, the community has never been more divided. Those with even a peripheral interest in this subject will know that the United States Anti-Doping Agency now has a deep mistrust of the World Anti-Doping Agency. The reverse is also true.
They both need to grow up and get on with the job. We need to keep paying attention.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram