It’s 3am in Australia and Novak Djokovic, who has just won his tenth title in Melbourne, hears a knock on his bedroom door. No, they are not coming to deport him again, it is the anti-doping control agency, which requires him for one last control before he leaves the country.
That is the day-to-day life of tennis players, who deal with continuous surprises and planning anti-doping controls months in advance, those that if you skip three times can generate a sanction of several months without competing.
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The critics
This is what has happened to Jenson Brooksby, an American tennis player who made it to the ‘top 30’ and whose wrist injuries have sent him out of the top 100.
The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA, for its acronym in English) decreed a sanction against him -without exact duration yet- for, supposedly, skipping three controls.
The American shielded himself that he has never skipped a control and that he has never taken prohibited substances and assured that he had evidence that, in one of the alleged absences, he was at the hotel where he had informed ITIA that he was going to be , but she did not appear.
“Once I didn’t hear them calling me at home, I can’t hear from the terrace. And they didn’t give a shit. You have to wait for them at the door of the house for an hour every day, 52 weeks a year,” he explained. Holger Runeone of the best in the world and, like the rest, is not exempt from the stress of these practices.
“We all have the same system. You have to put where you are, put an hour each day and the place where you are going to be and they can then decide to go and check if you are there or not. If you have three failures, they suspend you,” he adds the aussie Alex de Minaur, recent finalist at Queen’s.
This is complicated by changes in the calendar, logical in a circuit that travels every week from one country to another and sometimes even from one continent to another, with ticket cancellations, delays, changes of accommodation, injuries…
What does Alcaraz say?
“It’s super stressful to be updating the schedules and places,” says Rune, who also explains that if they call the phone and you don’t hear it, you can’t call back, since the operators are not authorized to answer.
“These are the rules and you have to comply with them,” he qualifies Carlos Alcaraz. “There are more demanding rules than others, but they are there to comply with them. You have to be aware every day, where you are going to be. It is our life and you have to know how to lead it.”
“They caught me almost when I left home. They arrived and I was at the door of the house. We lead a very chaotic life, but it’s the same rule for everyone,” adds the Spaniard. Daniel Medvedev, one of the most authoritative and eloquent voices on the circuit, clarified that from what he has heard, the fault, in the case of Brooksby, lay with the authorities, who knocked on the wrong door.
“I once failed two tests, in my first year with this system. It’s not easy. I don’t know, imagine you’re not married and you decide to sleep at your girlfriend’s house, who lives an hour from you. You decide in the At the last moment and you forget to change the time at which you have set the control. Well, you have already failed once and you quickly reach three”, commented the Russian.
“Many things can happen, your phone doesn’t work, for example. Many cases are due to bad luck, but there will also be players, as in all
sports, that deceive. You can never know everything,” concludes the Muscovite.
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