Jannik Sinner's three-month drugs ban from tennis felt all too convenient, too light on the fading principle of strict liability... excuse those of us rooting for Carlos Alcaraz at Wimbledon, writes RIATH AL-SAMARRAI

This is a true story - a dog once ate my homework. Well, he clawed a couple of pages into a state of disrepair, but my geography teacher didn’t quite buy that a border collie was solely responsible for late submission. Nor did a different teacher when the same pet peed on my sister’s English essay.

I miss that dog, a good boy mostly, but I also wonder what those teachers might have brought to the arbitration of doping disputes in elite sport.

So, here’s another scenario – Wimbledon commences on Monday and the top seed in the men’s draw is Jannik Sinner, the Italian phenomenon who rather famously blamed a failed drugs test on an extraordinary chain of events.

There were no dogs in his tale, just two pups left at the roadside when it came to apportioning blame for how an anabolic steroid got into his system last year.

Their names are Giacomo Naldi, a physiotherapist, and Umberto Ferrara, who was Sinner’s fitness coach. I can only speculate how much the Centre Court crowd will know or care about them, and their role in an almighty stink, when Sinner goes about his business in the coming fortnight.

But it is worth a trawl of the circumstances that saw Sinner twice test positive for clostebol in March 2024 and the means with which he argued his way to the flimsiest of three-month bans earlier this year.

Naldi and Ferrara? Their sanction was unofficial but a little more permanent - Sinner let them go.

How did they get to that place? That is told by a fairly wild set of case notes documenting how it all began, when Ferrara entered a chemist in Bologna on February 12 of last year and picked up a Trofodermin spray, which can be used to treat small cuts.

The key point is that within the ingredients, you find clostebol, a banned substance not commonly detected in sportsmen and women but, curiously, had started to pop up in a large number of Italian doping cases - between 2019 and 2023, there were 38 clostebol positives in Italian athletes.

As a smart man with a pharmacology degree, Ferrara knew better than most about what to avoid, and, more importantly, the imperative that clostebol should get nowhere near his client.

But he bought the spray anyway and it was with him when he then boarded a flight to join Sinner at a couple of tournaments in the United States, including a biggie at Indian Wells.

That’s where one of the minor dramas of touring life apparently occurred and spiralled towards a scandal. Because Naldi, who was sharing a villa with Sinner, Ferrara and the rest of the team, claimed he reached into Ferrara’s wash bag for something or other on March 3 and happened to cut his finger on a scalpel.

First, he tried a bandage and it caught Sinner’s eye – his legal team would later make a play of this when the case got to a hearing, because they put forward a specific recollection that the player asked Naldi on the same day if he had been using anything to treat the cut. A diligent sort, apparently. Only bandages, said Naldi.

But a couple of days later, the cut was not fully healed. And Ferrara had just the thing for him – a spray. To go by the case notes, Ferrara insisted he also warned his colleague that it contained clostebol and shouldn’t be applied near Sinner.

Ferrara was certain he said it; Naldi, under cross-examination, claimed to have no memory of being told that, but couldn’t be sure because he was jet-lagged after getting to the US.

What Naldi did accept is that, unknown to Sinner, he then used the spray every morning between March 5 and March 13, and throughout that period was giving his client daily, full-body massages with his bare hands.

Those sessions included contact with Sinner’s feet and back, which were both areas where Sinner had suffered with a skin condition called psoriasiform dermatitis and, as such, often had small cuts or sores. To go by what was in the hearings, Naldi knew never the spray contained a banned steroid and thus a most unusual farce had its defining act.

On March 10, the testers turned up, and on March 18, they came back again. Both times, a tiny amount of clostebol was found in Sinner’s urine.

Hell of a way to go, that, with all those little incidents conspiring to create a nightmare. And a hell of an excuse to place in the hands of your teacher, too.

But there is a different element of this that always stuck with me, which goes beyond the plausibility of the above. It concerns what came next.

Naturally, Sinner was gobsmacked when the International Tennis Integrity Agency notified him of the first failed test on Thursday, April 4 of 2024, triggering a provisional suspension. And yet, within hours his team had retraced enough steps from that mishmash of eccentric events to argue why it was an accident.

More remarkably, their appeal was so convincing the suspension was lifted the very next day. When a notification of the second positive arrived with a fresh suspension on April 17, Sinner’s lawyers got to work once again and had him back in a week.

We should apply a little context here to explain how unusual those timelines are, because doping is a messy, opaque world, and so are its legal processes. It’s incredibly hard to secure convictions in a space where there are almost no confessions and it’s even harder to land a quick knockout if you’re working for the accused.

But Sinner’s team got two provisional suspensions lifted for the loss of eight days.

A comparison is Tara Moore, a low-ranking, low-earning British doubles player. She was positive for nandrolone in 2022 and her provisional suspension ran for 19 months before it was accepted that she had eaten contaminated meat in Columbia. Her excuse was a complicated one, but also common for the genre.

Sinner? It was one of the most astonishing and unique chronologies I’ve heard in these doping discussions; the kind that warranted extreme diligence before even considering a decision to tag and release, irrespective of the concentration levels in a sample. Eight days.

After this all finally became public in August, when it was announced he had initially been cleared of negligence and intent by an independent tribunal, a number of tennis players erupted to say it reeked of one rule for the stars and another for the underlings. It was easy to agree.

And easier again in February, after the World Anti-Doping Agency challenged that finding but still settled on letting Sinner off with a three-month ban. Not only did he escape the worst of it, so a two-year exile, his sentence fell neatly between the first and second Slams of the season.

Like so much in this strangest of cases, it just felt too convenient. Too light on the fading principle of strict liability. Too willing to distinguish between the actions of the entourage and the man who employed them. Above all, the episode has stank of a joint effort to move on with the show and quickly.

Sinner, for all the turmoil he has discussed of late, had already done just that – since March 2024, he has won two of his three Slams and contributed to a final for the ages against Carlos Alcaraz at the French Open this month. His trauma was seemingly easier to manage than a cut finger.

And now he arrives at Wimbledon as a favourite, feted by a sport that would rather celebrate his rivalry with Alcaraz than dwell on harder questions.

You’ll have to excuse those of us who are rooting for Alcaraz.

A Headingely classic

Cricket was never my first love but the best sport I saw all week came across the final two days of England’s Test against India. The best of last week were the three days leading up to them. A great reminder that not all things should be packaged for those in a rush.

All about the money

The WBC is supposedly the most respected of boxing’s governing bodies. It has also sanctioned a world-title fight for 46-year-old Manny Pacquiao, who retired in 2021 to the consensus that it was a prudent idea. These guys really don’t care about anything beyond the fee.