Tennis players accused of doping will receive financial and legal support from authorities

Tennis players who test positive for banned substances will receive financial and legal support for their cases from the sport’s anti-doping authority, the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) announced on Wednesday.

Any player investigated for breaching the sport’s anti-doping or anti-corruption rules will receive financial assistance, confidential third-party counseling and additional free legal support. Sports Resolutions, which runs the tribunals for tennis doping cases, will now provide lawyers for players from when they first test positive for a banned substance, instead of from the date of their being charged with an anti-doping violation.

The financial assistance amounts to $5,000 for product testing at a World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA)-accredited lab, and the same amount for analysis and investigation of meat contamination. An ITIA spokesperson said that a WADA-accredited lab test costs around $1,000 on average.

The financial resources to access laboratory testing and top lawyers were at the center of high-profile anti-doping cases involving world No. 2s and Grand Slam champions Jannik Sinner and Iga Świątek. Świątek submitted batches of a melatonin supplement and hair samples for lab testing to prove that she tested positive for trimetazidine through contamination, while Sinner quickly and successfully appealed his two provisional suspensions for testing positive for clostebol within the 10-day window that sees those suspensions kept private according to ITIA protocol.

Świątek ultimately served a one-month suspension in late 2024, on top of the provisional suspension that saw her miss the WTA 1000 events in China this time last year, while Sinner served a three-month suspension earlier this season after reaching a case resolution agreement with WADA. The organization had appealed the ITIA’s verdict in Sinner’s case, which had seen him receive no suspension, with WADA initially seeking a suspension of one or two years at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

While the resolutions of those cases followed ITIA and WADA regulations and precedent, their speed and brevity still engendered resentment among tennis players over the perception of a two-tier system for higher- and lower-ranked players. The reality is that not every player could afford the kind of lab testing and other measures that Sinner and Świątek were able to take, and the ITIA’s new trial of these measures, which will be reviewed at the end of 2026, is an attempt to bridge some of that gap.

It was through meat contamination that the British player Tara Moore was initially exonerated by an independent tribunal in December 2023 for her positive test for anabolic steroids boldenone and nandrolone in April 2022. The independent tribunal’s verdict was overturned in July when, after the ITIA appealed that decision, CAS ruled that Moore couldn’t prove the level of nandrolone in her sample was consistent with the ingestion of contaminated meat. She was given a four-year ban, with time deducted for the time served when initially suspended, and will be free to return to the sport in 2028. Moore has been an outspoken critic of how her case has been handled throughout and said shortly after receiving the ban that “the anti-doping system is broken.”

In January, Moore co-founded the Athlete Counsel & Equity (ACE) Program with the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA), the organisation co-founded by Novak Djokovic to protect the interests of the players. The initiative provides players with pro-bono legal support through global law firms King & Spalding LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP.

The ITIA’s CEO Karen Moorhouse said in Wednesday’s news release that: “Anyone who finds themselves part of either an anti-doping or anti-corruption investigation deserves the opportunity to defend or explain themselves, and we recognise the process can come at both a financial and emotional cost.

“No player picks up a tennis racket as a child with any motivation other than playing the game. Individuals find themselves in these situations for a lot of reasons, and so no matter what those reasons are, and where the case ends up, they also deserve someone to talk to.”

The ITIA was established in 2021 by tennis’ seven governing bodies to oversee tennis’s anti-doping and anti-corruption programme. It effectively replaced the International Tennis Federation’s (ITF) Tennis Integrity Unit, which existed from 2008 to 2020.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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