For all his leaps and lunges, Jannik Sinner was hardly sweating. It was a relatively cool afternoon in Queens, but the tennis phenom’s bone-dry shirt had more to do with the ease with which he’d just dismantled his opponent, Taylor Fritz, in a three-set U.S. Open final on September 8.
It was over quickly, the sort of match that allows fans to saunter back to Manhattan well ahead of their dinner reservations. And it went perfectly for Sinner, the 23-year-old who’d just won the second Grand Slam of his career, upheld his World No. 1 title (the first Italian to reach that rank), and gotten a nice big trophy to show off at his Monte Carlo homecoming (he owns a house there). Seemingly nothing could sour such an idyllic moment.
Well, except one thing.
Just a few weeks prior, on August 20, the International Tennis Integrity Agency (I.T.I.A.), an independent organization that oversees corruption and doping investigations in professional tennis, revealed that Sinner had tested positive for a banned anabolic steroid, called clostebol, on two separate occasions in March.
According to the report, Sinner had participated in an investigation into his steroid use (which began following his first positive test and utilized multiple outside experts, some of whom were not aware of Sinner’s identity) and had been found innocent of wrongdoing, with “no fault or negligence.” Specifically, the investigation’s results stated that while he did have clostebol in his system, it had gotten there “by accident,” citing the far-fetched story, put up by Sinner’s representatives, that involved a healing ointment and a massage table. (Sinner did not respond to AIR MAIL’s request for comment.)
Needless to say, this did not go over quietly in the sports world. Before the details of Sinner’s case circulated, fans wondered why he was being allowed to play matches during an ongoing investigation. If he was indeed innocent, why was the I.T.I.A. still forcing him to forfeit the $325,000 in prize money and the 400 ranking points he had won during the month of his infraction? And was his alibi so improbable that it might actually be true?
Enter the Massage Table
The story, as it was laid out in the I.T.I.A.’s report, begins with Sinner’s fitness coach, Umberto Ferrara. According to testimony by Sinner’s team, Ferrara had purchased a clostebol-containing medical spray, brand name Trofodermin, over the counter in Italy. Ferrara brought it to the Indian Wells Open and gave it Sinner’s physiotherapist, Giacomo Naldi, who used it to treat a cut on his finger.
Naldi had apparently gashed himself with a scalpel on March 3 and used the Trofodermin spray on it every morning from March 5 to March 13. During this period, he massaged Sinner without gloves. Because Sinner suffers from psoriasiform dermatitis, a skin disorder that leads to rashes (similar to psoriasis) on his back and feet, it was successfully argued that the clostebol within the medical spray must have seeped into Sinner’s system upon Naldi’s massaging, which led to the positive tests—the first on March 10 and the second on March 18.
We can only speculate about how severe Naldi’s wound was, considering it was significant enough for him to use a steroid-containing spray on it for over a week, but not significant enough to warrant a bandage while massaging his athlete skin-to-skin.
Or about how Ferrara had evidently not noticed, before he purchased it, the large red “ban” symbol over the word “doping” listed—by Italian law—on over-the-counter Trofodermin bottles sold in the country. This is a bizarre oversight, considering Ferrara is a qualified pharmacist, who was reportedly tasked with handling anti-doping protocol within Sinner’s team. (Sinner has since fired both men.)
Sinner is far from the first Italian athlete to test positive in recent years—and claim accidental exposure. The 21-year-old Italian tennis player Matilde Paoletti, for example, successfully appealed her clostebol case three years ago on the argument that she had been petting her Chihuahua, who had been prescribed a spray containing the substance. Stefano Battaglino, also an Italian pro, had no puppy to lean on; his excuse—that he, like Sinner, had been massaged by a physiotherapist who contaminated him with clostebol—didn’t hold up after a positive test, and he was hit with a four-year doping ban in 2023.
And what exactly is this drug, used on canines and wounds and athletic specimens alike?
Like all anabolic steroids, clostebol is “a testosterone derivative,” explains Dr. Mike Israetel, who has a Ph.D. in sport physiology and has worked at multiple U.S. Olympic training centers and coached elite athletes. “It does most of the things that testosterone does, and it’s quite rare, so some specific tests—at least a while back—weren’t picking it up. That’s kind of how it got its popularity in drug-cheating circles,” he says.
Anabolic steroids are particularly beneficial to athletes because they can increase muscle size and strength, heighten aggression and competitive drive, and reduce recovery time between workouts or after an injury. And they have a lasting impact, to the extent that even once steroid use ceases, an athlete will maintain an advantage over clean competitors. In short, athletes who take anabolic steroids are “typically quicker, and they’re faster, and they can jump higher, and they can do most athletic things better,” says Israetel.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (W.A.D.A.)—which, in the hierarchy of anti-doping organizations, is a step above the I.T.I.A.—has noted that positive clostebol tests are “especially” prevalent in Italy, considering that drugs (such as Trofodermin) containing it are sold in the country without prescriptions. Given all this, you’d think Ferrara might’ve been extra careful about purchasing Trofodermin. How could a mistake with such potentially ruinous consequences, for an athlete quite literally at the top of his game, have been made?
What exactly is this drug, used on canines and wounds and athletic specimens alike?
Performance-enhancing drug use is nothing new in professional sports, where an avalanche of money and fame awaits those who win and win often, but things used to be more clear-cut. Remember the 1976 East German women’s swim team, who, after their country forced them to inject testosterone, arrived on the pool deck looking like a Kiwi rugby team? Or what about all those increasingly impressive male Tour de France winners, of whom 44 in the last 56 years (Lance Armstrong, most famously) were caught doping at some point in their careers?
There was also the Steroids Era of baseball, from the late 1980s to the late 2000s, during which many of the game’s biggest stars were betrayed by 470-foot home runs and forearms the size of anvils. And dare we even mention the prevalence of recreational artificial testosterone, seen in flagrante within the alarming pectorals of Joe Rogan and the biceps of America’s potential future health czar, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?
Now, the trend in doping seems to be tending toward blaming tainted medicine—or massage therapists, or dogs, or even food—with varying success. The baseball star Fernando Tatis Jr., who was popped for clostebol in 2022, claimed he had accidentally used a medication that contained the drug to treat ringworm; he was banned for 80 games. Likewise, in 2021, Shelby Houlihan, the American record holder in the 1,500-meter run, unsuccessfully blamed a positive test for nandrolone (another anabolic steroid) on a hormonal-pork burrito she had eaten; she was banned for four years.
When weighing the likelihood of a top-level athlete testing positive due to accidental ingestion, “we have to reserve, as open-minded people, the possibility that [the explanations] are true,” says Israetel. “Though, on a total metric analysis, the probability that these people are lying is insanely high.” To him, it’s a question of statistical feasibility; he adds that cases involving testosterone-tainted beef or a cream used by a massage therapist strain the imagination. “If you construct a world where that’s possible, it starts to look like a world that’s very, very, very preposterously unlikely.”
As Charles Scheeler, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Mitchell Report—the landmark case that revealed rampant drug use during baseball’s Steroid Era—says, “If there is a monetary incentive to cheat—and there is—there will always be some.”
“It’s like bank robbery,” Scheeler continues. “Bank robbers are never going away. They just change their methods. Now, they’re not using guns; they’re using keystrokes.”
There are cases when bank robbers not only get away with it but make fools out of the authorities. This transpired last April, when The New York Times reported that 23 Chinese swimmers had tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned prescription heart medication that can improve athletic performance, ahead of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. Only upon the Times’s investigation years later did this news become public—long after some of these athletes had competed in Tokyo and won medals.
China had apparently argued that the positive tests came from a “tainted food supply,” which, even if true, did not explain why the results were not publicized. W.A.D.A. had, by all accounts, swept the incident under the rug.
“On a total metric analysis, the probability that these people are lying is insanely high.”
When a case like Sinner’s comes along, the I.T.I.A. gets put in an uncomfortable position. Its investigation, and the experts it consulted, said Sinner was innocent; outsiders looking in have their doubts. Of course, the same was true of W.A.D.A. following the China swimming scandal, after which the organization’s reputation was significantly damaged.
As it happens, Sinner could end up a casualty of what appears to be W.A.D.A.’s quest to repair its credibility. On September 28, the organization announced that it’s appealing the I.T.I.A.’s ruling at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (C.A.S.), an international body that handles disputes between other athletic governing organizations. While W.A.D.A. does not dispute the I.T.I.A.’s belief that Sinner’s clostebol use was an accident, it seemingly hopes to indicate that any steroid use, intentional or not, deserves punishment. (W.A.D.A. declined to comment.)
With its renewed investigation, W.A.D.A. may be looking to make Sinner an example and show that it doesn’t treat these cases lightly. In the midst of Sinner’s A.T.P. Tour Finals win over Fritz this week—which netted nearly $5 million in prize money for the Italian—the president of his country’s tennis federation, Angelo Binaghi, bemoaned that “apart from a few imbeciles, people all around the world understand what happened,” adding that “no matter what type of decision is issued, there’s no doubt that Sinner is one of the cleanest and most honest athletes in world sport.” Meanwhile, a verdict on W.A.D.A.’s appeal against Sinner isn’t expected until next year.
For the Italian hero, this could mean a multi-year ban, along with a temporary loss of the nice big trophies, the World No. 1 title, and the cleanliness of his image. Be that as it may, amid all the question marks surrounding the Sinner saga, it’s probably fair to assume: now, he’s going to be sweating.
Jack Sullivan is an Associate Editor at Air Mail
