Iga Swiatek, the case of Tara Moore and a problem at the heart of tennis

Perhaps the first thing to say about Iga Swiatek is that she did not deliberately dope. The report on her case makes this crystal clear. The bottle of melatonin tablets which her team identified as the culprit was proved by independent laboratory testing to have come from a batch contaminated with the banned substance trimetazidine, small traces of which triggered her positive sample.

But then Tara Moore didn’t deliberately dope either. Not according to an independent tribunal, which concluded that the British doubles player had likely been contaminated by meat consumed in a local restaurant when she tested positive for two prohibited substances, nandrolone and boldenone, at a tournament in Colombia in April 2022. Tellingly, Moore was one of three players among 21 tested at the tournament whose samples contained boldenone, an unqualified spate for a substance found in only 0.03% of samples worldwide.

So why is it that Moore lost 19 months of her career, 600 ranking places and hundreds of thousands of pounds in a public fight to prove her innocence (and is still doing so, with her case set to go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport next year), while Swiatek received a one-month ban a matter of weeks after being tested in August, in a case which was kept under wraps by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA)?

Another comparison can be drawn between Italian men Jannik Sinner, the world No 1 who escaped punishment after successfully arguing he had been inadvertently contaminated by his physiotherapist (the World Anti-Doping Agency is appealing against his no-fault verdict), and the lowly ranked Stefano Battaglino, who tested positive for the same drug as Sinner – clostebol – and made a similar argument in defence. Battaglino was banned for four years.

Every case is nuanced and no two instances are the same, but perhaps the most glaring point of difference when reviewing these verdicts is that Sinner and Swiatek had the resources to quickly and effectively launch legal challenges to defend themselves, while Moore and Battaglino did not.

The expensively assembled lawyers of five-time grand slam champion Swiatek and two-time slam winner Sinner successfully appealed against their mandatory provisional suspensions within 10 days of first being informed of their test results, meaning the cases did not have to be publicly disclosed.

Both players then went to great lengths to explain the circumstances around their contamination. Sinner produced a detailed story which involved a cut on his physio’s finger and lesions on his massaged feet in order to explain how clostebol had entered his body. Swiatek had her medications and supplements tested in laboratories to identify the source of contamination.

Like most players, Moore was not so well equipped, returning the ITIA’s fire with the equivalent of a wooden racket. Admittedly her case was more complex, with the challenge of trying to prove exactly when and where she had eaten contaminated meat in the Colombian capital, Botafogo. Yet it still took an extraordinary length of time for her case to be heard, and it plunged her into financial peril.

“I’m hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt,” Moore told The Times earlier this year. “Every time I play, it’s not just about winning or losing, it’s, ‘Can I pay this off?’ And I know there’s still a long fight in front of me.”

After Swiatek’s case became public this week, German player Eva Lys tweeted: “What about players that ate contaminated meat in south America ? Why didnt @TaraMoore92 get a one month suspension? Im slowly starting to think, that not everyone gets an equal process… there are alot of lower ranked players, that are not getting the same treatment as ‘higher ranked’ players. I’m not saying someone is/ or is not innocent, I’m saying that everyone deserves equal opportunities.”

In another difference between the haves and have nots of tennis, Battaglino was using a physio supplied by the event he was attending when he tested positive for clostebol. So while Sinner was able to identify not only the physiotherapist on his personal team but the offending product which was used, Battaglino’s efforts to contact the event’s physio were in vain. Without physical evidence, he lost his fight.

It was left to an unlikely spokesperson, Novak Djokovic, to articulate the issue in August following the Sinner case: “As I understood, his case was cleared the moment basically it was announced, but I think five or six months passed since the news was brought to him and his team. So … I can understand the sentiments of a lot of players that are questioning whether they are treated the same.

“Many players, without naming any of them, have had pretty much the same cases, where they haven’t had the same outcome, 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.

“That’s something I feel like we have to collectively investigate more … how we can standardise everything so that every player, regardless of his ranking or status or profile, is able to get the same kind of treatment.”

It is right that Sinner and Swiatek were able to quickly and forcefully defend themselves. They were even able to retain control of their own narratives, with carefully curated statements released in tandem with the ITIA’s verdict. But it is disturbing that players further down the food chain embroiled in complex cases are on the back foot. When Moore received her test results she had no idea what to do. “I always knew the truth, but it’s incredibly scary. There’s no manual.”

Well, if contamination is so plausible then perhaps there should be. Not everyone can be armed with the same legal firepower as the world’s best players, but their high-profile cases have shone a light on the inequality at the heart of tennis’s justice system, a system capable of harming the athletes that it claims to serve.