 "Jannik Sinner admitted the doping scandal was playing on his mind ahead of his defence of the Australian Open crown. AP")
Jannik Sinner’s hearing on allegations of doping at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) will be taking place on 16 and 17 April, the Lausanne-based body confirmed on Friday. CAS added that the hearing will be a closed-door affair as neither Sinner nor World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the organisation that has appealed against the Italian tennis star, requested for a public hearing.
WADA had appealed against the International Tennis Integrity Agency’s decision to clear Sinner despite the world No 1 testing positive for banned steroid clostebol twice in March last year. The ITIA had accepted Sinner’s explanation that the drug had entered his system through a spray used by his physio to treat a cut.
Sinner, who enters the upcoming Australian Open as the defending champion and had also won the US Open last year, admitted the scandal was still playing on his mind ahead of the first Grand Slam of the year.
“I know exactly as much as you guys know. We are in a stage where we don’t know many, many things,” Sinner, who faces Chile’s Nicolas Jarry in the first round at the Melbourne Park, said.
“You think about this, of course,” he said. “I would lie if I would tell you I forget.
“It’s something what I have with me now already for quite a long time. But it is what it is. I’m here trying to prepare the Grand Slam. Let’s see how it goes,” the 23-year-old added.
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Sinner, however, continued to maintain that he had done no wrong, and that he has always been “very, very careful on every single medicine I take, even what I eat.”
“When the bottle is open, I throw it away, I take a new one,” he said.
“In my mind I know exactly what happened, and that’s how I block it (out).
“I haven’t done anything wrong, that’s why I’m still here. That’s why I’m still playing,” Sinner added.
ATP chairman Andrea Gaudenzi, meanwhile, denied Sinner had been given any preferential treatment in the doping case.
“I genuinely believe there has been a lot of misinformation out there, which is unfortunate,” Gaudenzi told the Australian Associated Press in a recent interview.
“I am 100 percent sure that there has not been any preferential treatment. The process has been run by the book and according to the rules, by the ITIA,” Gaudenzi said.
Sinner wasn’t the only high-profile tennis player who tested positive for doping last year. World No 2 and four-time French Open winner Iga Swiatek had tested positive for a banned substance trimetazidine , a heart medication known as TMZ, in an out-of-competition sample submitted in August last year.
Also Read | Djokovic, Kyrgios call for more transparency after Sinner and Swiatek’s doping cases
The former world No 1, however, accepted a one-month suspension for the positive test and was back in action in the WTA finals in November.
The relatively light sentences handed out to Sinner and Swiatek, however, has led to criticism from other tennis players, including and especially former Wimbledon and French Open champion Simona Halep.