TENNIS – ITF reveals anti-doping stats. The International Tennis Federation has published their anti-doping statistics. These show an improvement with 449 tests done out of competition compared to just 10 in 2010. But if the overall improvement is still remarkable, the numbers are very far from the sports where controls are the most rigorous. Giulio Gasparin
By the end of the last season, British cyclist Mark Cavendish attacked the International Tennis Federation from the pages of the Daily Telegraph for how little control was done on doping.
He reported that the ITF had conducted only 21 blood tests during the 2011 off-season, while in the same period, the cycling federation had conducted more than 4,000.
The latest data that the tennis federation revealed show how lots has been done to make sure that tennis would come as a sport that fights doping and from the 10 blood tests of the 2010 off-season, in 2013 449 tests were done out of competition.
But if the overall improvement is still remarkable, the numbers are very far from the sports where controls are the most rigorous, even considering that the ones showed by the ITF do not include the tests organised by national federations.
Novak Djokovic no longer than last year labelled the anti-doping officers as “negligent and unprofessional” and despite the growth in tests, it seems that some of the numbers showed by the freshly revealed documents prove his statement.
As it is almost common knowledge, doping during competition is growing smaller in every sport, but the same cannot be said about the off-season.
Athletes use banned substances during the off-season to improve their ability to sustain harder trainings and therefore improve their physical capacities ahead of the season of competitions.
For this reason, the role of off-season tests is pivotal for the control over athletes and the patrolling for clean sport.
Thus said, it is fundamental that controls during the season and especially during the big events keep being enforced, but it is during the off-season that the biggest efforts should be aimed.
The introduction of the famous whereabouts surely helped to give an important message in the fight against doping, but as stats reveal, not all the top players received many visits by inspectors during their winter “holidays”.
Andy Murray heard the doorbell ringing only between four and six times and the same happened to Djokovic and Serena Williams. Strangely it is the same range in which Swedish Sofia Arvidsson fell, despite, with no offence taken, she has never achieved as much as the other.
But if some players seem to receive more visits from anti-doping officers than from their families (Sara Errani, Roberta Vinci, David Ferrer, Petra Kvitova and many others have taken more than seven tests in the off-season and as many in the regular season), some others did not even have the chance to offer a tea to them.
The most striking case is the one of Juan Martin Del Potro. The Argentine did not get to face any test during the off-season, despite finishing the year as world number five.
But he is not the only one being deprived from the pleasure of an off-season test: young up and coming promise Eugenie Bouchard and former world number one Jelena Jankovic lead the list of top players with no off-season tests.
It can be argued that tennis, differently from other sports, has never assisted to clamorous cases of doping, but it is clear that lots more need to be done to prevent any chance of that to happen in the future.
However, the effort that the federation is putting in the battle remains remarkable and the publication of data like the ones released in the past days is a sign of transparency that other sports should follow.
For more detailed data consult the archive from ITF at http://www.itftennis.com/antidoping/statistics/data.aspx
