We Don't Care about Doping

Jannik Sinner is in the fourth round of the Australian Open. He’s lost one set on his way there to an Australian who is named the way that a 15 year old would save a girl named Kate who he met at school in his phone.

 

In August of 2024, that same Jannik Sinner tested positive for Clostebol which is on the banned substance list. There was less than a billionth of a gram in his system, so the International Tennis Integrity Agency said there was nothing to see here.

 

I note that anti-doping rules are strict liability, which means if you fall foul of them, you’re suspended.

 

Tennis clearing a tennis star is like having Vito Corleone sit as the senator in Michael Corleone trial in The Godfather 2. There’s a bit of a conflict there.

 

WADA also took issue with tennis pulling a Joe Biden and pardoning its son, so it has appealed the not even a slap on the wrist outcome for Sinner. WADA is seeking a one to two year suspension.

 

Unlike WADA, the tennis establishment isn’t in a massive rush to besmirch the name of their 23 year old world number 1 when the void left after Federer, Nadal and Djokovic either retired or slipped is wider than ever.

 

As such, Todd Woodbridge hasn’t exactly been quick to bring up the positive test in commentary. The only person who seems upset about it is Nick Kyrgios.

 

But tennis’ indifference toward Sinner’s positive test is emblematic, to me, of a wider attitude toward doping in sport.

 

We don’t care.

 

We treat tennis like Selina Meyer treats Catherine. Selina doesn’t have time to hear about Catherine’s syndrome, we don’t have time to hear about your positive test. 

 

We say that we do, and sometimes if we didn’t like the athlete in the first place we might get a bit outraged about it, but when push comes to shove we want to see the best players play.

 

In our heart of hearts, we all understand that chances are our favourite athlete is likely getting some help to get on the court, field, ring or whatever. And we accept it because we want to see the person compete.

 

We react like Tony Soprano when Johnny Sac told him how angry he was about Ralph’s joke about the 90 pound mole on Ginny Sac’s ass. 

 

Tony says “that’s deplorable” while hiding a smile, then he immediately pivots to finding the source and then saying that he didn’t hear the joke (Narrator: Tony did hear the joke).

 

Like us with steroids, Tony knew he just didn’t particularly care.

 

To make the point, here’s a list of well-established likely steroid or at the very least performance enhancing drug users:

·      Lance Armstrong

·      The entire Essendon football club

·      Sammy Sosa

·      Mark McGwire

·      The Russian Olympic team

·      The US Olympic Team

·      Floyd Mayweather

 

How many of those people or people who were part of an established performance enhancing substance program ever tested positive for steroids? Zero.

 

What does that tell us? Like in all things, Chael Sonnen was right. Chael said that, at the time that he fought Jon Jones drug testing was less drug testing and more IQ testing.

 

That remains true.

 

The ability of these performance enhancing drugs to mask themselves simply works faster than testers’ ability to keep up.

 

More than that, the only ones on that list that elicited any real outrage when they either admitted their cheating or were found out were Lance Armstrong and the Russians, and the outrage wasn’t even for the steroids.

 

(Granted, the baseball players had issues at the time and are still out of the hall of fame but most non-baseball writers find this to be absurd and look back with fondness on that era of baseball.)

 

For Lance, like with Bill Cosby, the worst part was the hypocrisy. 

 

He portrayed himself as this puritanical crusader off the track but in reality he was an ego-driven bully.

 

As for the Russians, in the 2021 film Nobody we had this miscellaneous Russian drug addict villain who didn’t have a lot going on outside of his villainy and everyone’s prevailing thought about the movie was that “it’s cool to see Saul Goodman fighting”. 

 

There was no moral outrage about a lack of character depth because Russians, at least in the west, are still villains and we’re still mostly chill with it. It tracks that there aren’t huge issues with villainising them in the real world either, particularly after recent geo-political events.

 

But what about the athletes who do test positive?

 

Surely they are treated with moral outrage? Well, let’s look at some recent examples.

 

Jannik Sinner popped on 20 August 2024 and won the US Open on 8 September 2024.

 

Sergio Ramos tested positive on multiple occasions while he was the captain of Real Madrid and was never sanctioned by WADA or UEFA.

 

Justin Gatlin tested positive in 2001 and he was actually banned. His 100m sprint PB at the time of the positive test was the then world-record 9.77 seconds.  In 2015, aged 33, he broke his PB running a 9.74.

 

Beyond them, I could do a million combat sports examples because of the truly insane lack of oversight in all combat sports. The UFC, for instance, is doing its own testing after severing its relationship with USADA.

 

Separate to that, here are two examples from two of the biggest names in combat today.

 

Jon Jones tested has tested positive multiple times and was banned twice for various steroids. He’s currently the UFC heavyweight champion and Dana White’s favourite fighter.

 

Canelo Alvarez tested positive and got a six month suspension, which is no suspension at all for a fighter who fights every six months and is now looking likely to fight Terrence Crawford for the biggest payday of his extremely rich career.

 

All these facts are established. Nobody cares about them.

 

As an AFL fan, I’ll leave you with this.

 

AFL players are in weekly car crashes from March until September. They regularly run upwards of 15km per game while getting careened into by other freak athletes.

 

Then they do it again.

 

A club-wide illegal peptide injection program was uncovered over a decade ago.

 

The only AFL players that are publicly known to have ever tested positive for ingesting a performance enhancing substance are Ryan Crowley, Ahmed Saad, Lachie Keefe, and Josh Thomas.

 

I find it hard to believe they’re the only AFL players to have got a little help with their recovery or their skin-folds.

 

I also don’t care. Neither do you.