Tennis has a lot of politics in it. I am not familiar with all of them but there is definitely some preferential treatment that certain people get that would not be offered to others. Jannik Sinner, a tennis player who has seen meteoric rise in the past few years to the number 1 spot at the top of the rankings, has tested positive for steroids twice... yet he is not going to be punished.
There has been various explanations made that all seem like PR bullshit to me about how Sinner didn't mean to do it. Sorry, I'm not buying that. What Jannik didn't mean to do was get caught. Doping is all over the place in sports and it seems to me that when it happens in tennis that it depends on who you are, not what you did. Remember how a lot of the world and especially the people of Australia turned on Djokovic because he didn't want to get vaccinated against Covid? If it had been Novak that tested positive for steroids there would be a mob that would be demanding that he be stripped of all of his awards the he has won over the years... of this I feel rather certain.
But Sinner is not getting that sort of treatment and the "independent tribunal?" What the hell does that even mean?
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I don't mind Jannik Sinner, I find it a bit refreshing to have someone with a different playstyle from a different country to excel at the sport. However, here is one interesting point about this decision from the ATP to not suspend Sinner: The chairman of the ATP is Andrea Gaudenzi and if you can't tell by the name alone, he is Italian. This is suspicious as hell and really should be looked into more thoroughly.
Nick Kyrgios, who is not at all afraid to speak his mind in the press, expressed the outrage that a lot of us fans as well as players are feeling about someone getting caught cheating, and not being punished.
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Just to add context, Jannik Sinner's team claimed that the steroids that were in his system came from a massage cream and while reports are mixed, some statements state that they didn't know the cream contained the banned substance and others state that the cream is meant to have an allowable level of it in it. Either way, I think that Kyrgios is correct. It's kind of like oh I didn't mean to crash my car! Therefore I shouldn't be charged with hit and run.
I suppose it is conceivable that Sinner and his team didn't mean to do it, as unlikely as that seems. However, I want to imagine the fallout if Daniil Medvedev or Andrey Rublev had been the ones that had tested positive. Just because of their nationality they would get the book thrown at them, stripped of awards and money, and perhaps banned from tennis for multiple years if not permanently.
This sort of favoritism really shouldn't exist in sport but it does and likely always will. I hope that Sinner gets some boos when he plays in his next tournament because that's precisely what would happen if Nole, Andrey, or Daniil were in the exact same situation.
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