Tennis icon Novak Djokovic has called on the sport’s anti-doping system to be urgently reviewed after world No.1 Jannik Sinner was banned for three months.
Italian Sinner has agreed a three-month suspension after reaching a settlement with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). The 23-year-old and recent Australian Open champion will therefore return to action in time for the next Grand Slam, the French Open, which begins on May 25.
In accepting the ban, Sinner admitted ‘partial responsibility’ for mistakes made by his team which led to him testing positive for traces of clostebol on two occasions in March of last year. Also in 2024, Iga Swiatek was handed a one-month ban – during which she relinquished her women’s world No.1 ranking – after testing positive for trimetazidine. The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) accepted that it was caused by contamination of a medicine which Swiatek had taken to help combat jet lag.
Speaking about the pair’s high-profile and hotly-debated suspensions ahead of the ATP Qatar Open, Djokovic said that there ‘inconsistencies’ in Sinner and Swiatek’s cases when compared to those involving lower-ranked players. The winner of 24 Grand Slam titles also claimed that tennis stars feel that there’s an element of ‘favouritism’ when it comes to the best players fighting bans.
“It’s not a good image for our sport, that’s for sure,” Djokovic admitted. “The majority of the players feel like there is favouritism happening. It seems like it appears that you can almost affect the outcome if you are a top player, if you have access to the top lawyers and whatnot.
“Swiatek and Sinner are innocent and it’s proven, unless it’s proven otherwise. So, right now we know they’re innocent. We’ve seen on social media, Simona Halep and Tara Moore and some other players that are maybe less known, that have been struggling to resolve their cases for years or have gotten the ban for years.”
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Former women’s world No.1 Halep was slapped with a four-year suspension by the ITIA in 2022 following a positive drugs test, although her ban was later reduced to nine months. Meanwhile, Britain’s Moore, a less well-known player, was suspended in the same year before an independent tribunal determined that contaminated meat was the source of the banned substances for which she tested positive.
“I think right now it’s a ripe time for us to really address the system, because the system and the structure obviously doesn’t work with anti-doping,” Djokovic added. “It’s obvious. So, I hope that in the next period of the near future that the governing bodies are going to come together of our Tours and the tennis ecosystem and try to find a more, effective way to to deal with these processes.”
Fellow tennis star Nick Kyrgios claimed on social media over the weekend that Sinner’s three-month ban shows that ‘fairness in tennis does not exist’. Kyrgios posted on X, formerly Twitter: “So WADA come out and say it would be a 1-2 year ban.
Obviously Sinner’s team have done everything in their power to just go ahead and take a 3 month ban, no titles lost, no prize money lost. Guilty or not? Sad day for tennis. Fairness in tennis does not exist.”
In a separate post, the Aussie added: “I know a lot of players that are feeling the same way at the moment. So he was found guilty – hence the ban. But didn’t get stripped of anything and can play the French. Sad sad sad day.”
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