Ruud is characteristically thoughtful, in contrast to Djokovic whose comments are at best uncharitable and at worst malicious.
I listened to the Served podcast and was somewhat shocked that intelligent people like Roddick and Wertheim view this outcome as even-handed or even favorable to Sinner.
He has lost five master's 1000s (last year's IW points plus this year's 4 master 1000s). At the peak of his career, he is put in a position where winning the year-end number one will require out-competing Alcarez and others by an enormous margin. That's a lot for 'no fault or negligence'.
WADA's claim that it needs to enforce the 'principle' that players are responsible for their team members. But the principle should be that they are responsible for their team members' DOPING and WADA agreed with ITAA that there was NO doping, just a stupid screw-up. The principle is meant to prevent an athlete from claiming that a team member gave them a protein shake that had clostebol of an effacacious level in it. That principle should be defended, but it's not what Wada or ITAA said happened in this case. So there position is incoherent and, I would say, immoral.
The doping regime is necessarily harsh as we know that a soft regime will fail. Ideally, the principle of innocent until proven guilty should be applied, but we know, if it were, it would be impossible to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, so WADA works with the principle of guilty (if forbidden substances are found in your body) until proven innocent. As highly uncomfortable as it is, I agree this is the only way to have a clean sport. But it makes in incumbent on WADA not to abuse its power as it did in this case using the malicious prosecutorial methods of threatening an exorbitant punishment in order to force as an innocent player (as determined by WADA and ITAA, not me) to confess guilt (which as BBC article notes, he didn't want t0). To me that is immoral; and to me, Djokovic (who I've often defended against his critics as an honorable if occasionally misguided man) casting this as a rotten bargain, is even worse.
I find the variation in what is believed, what is understood, and what happened to be gigantic. That BBC piece makes clear what I thought was obvious from the fact of the settlement: WADA approached Sinner's team, not vice-versa, because WADA actually had more to lose. If WADA had been confident of getting a 1-2year suspension, no number of approaches from the Sinner side would have persuaded it to settle. But WADA feared a loss at CAS,and if *that* happened then the whole structure of "strict liability" - the player is responsible not only for themself, but their team too - collapses. And if *that* happens, cycling teams can start doping riders, and the tested-positive riders can say "but look at this precedent!" when they (well, their team) complain to CAS.
This way, WADA doesn't put "strict liability" in peril, gets a suspension, everyone's happy.
Except of course zillions of people on social media, who don't understand the principles, or are working hard not to. What I find astonishing is that every single account calling this a fix, or corrupt, or pointing out that someone else got a different ban (or all three) is, without exception, a Djokovic fan. Alcaraz fans, fans of Zverev, Rubley, Medvedev (I assume they exist), whatever rump of Federer and Nadal fans exist, Murray fans - none of them seems troubled. But the Djokovic fans are absolutely incensed - you can probably think of at least one account - and waste no time in trying to understand the niceties and nuance, or being accurate about what happened.
What I don't get is: why? Why is it only the Djokovic fans?
I think that's a very good point--zero suspension is an awful result for WADA, so they were really willing to take anything to avoid their own defeat. But yeah, the pre-bluster that came with it still shouldn't be necessary, I think.
isn’t the 1-2 years just the current rules? Sounds like there’s an announced change starting 2027, but the current code doesn’t really allow <1y for Sinner’s case if they find any fault or negligence.
This is mostly coming from Served last week, though she did seem to imply that the tribunal could in practice do whatever it wanted, but it sounded like anything more than 0 and <1y would be off book for the current rules they were supposed to imply
Ruud is characteristically thoughtful, in contrast to Djokovic whose comments are at best uncharitable and at worst malicious.
I listened to the Served podcast and was somewhat shocked that intelligent people like Roddick and Wertheim view this outcome as even-handed or even favorable to Sinner.
He has lost five master's 1000s (last year's IW points plus this year's 4 master 1000s). At the peak of his career, he is put in a position where winning the year-end number one will require out-competing Alcarez and others by an enormous margin. That's a lot for 'no fault or negligence'.
WADA's claim that it needs to enforce the 'principle' that players are responsible for their team members. But the principle should be that they are responsible for their team members' DOPING and WADA agreed with ITAA that there was NO doping, just a stupid screw-up. The principle is meant to prevent an athlete from claiming that a team member gave them a protein shake that had clostebol of an effacacious level in it. That principle should be defended, but it's not what Wada or ITAA said happened in this case. So there position is incoherent and, I would say, immoral.
The doping regime is necessarily harsh as we know that a soft regime will fail. Ideally, the principle of innocent until proven guilty should be applied, but we know, if it were, it would be impossible to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, so WADA works with the principle of guilty (if forbidden substances are found in your body) until proven innocent. As highly uncomfortable as it is, I agree this is the only way to have a clean sport. But it makes in incumbent on WADA not to abuse its power as it did in this case using the malicious prosecutorial methods of threatening an exorbitant punishment in order to force as an innocent player (as determined by WADA and ITAA, not me) to confess guilt (which as BBC article notes, he didn't want t0). To me that is immoral; and to me, Djokovic (who I've often defended against his critics as an honorable if occasionally misguided man) casting this as a rotten bargain, is even worse.
I find the variation in what is believed, what is understood, and what happened to be gigantic. That BBC piece makes clear what I thought was obvious from the fact of the settlement: WADA approached Sinner's team, not vice-versa, because WADA actually had more to lose. If WADA had been confident of getting a 1-2year suspension, no number of approaches from the Sinner side would have persuaded it to settle. But WADA feared a loss at CAS,and if *that* happened then the whole structure of "strict liability" - the player is responsible not only for themself, but their team too - collapses. And if *that* happens, cycling teams can start doping riders, and the tested-positive riders can say "but look at this precedent!" when they (well, their team) complain to CAS.
This way, WADA doesn't put "strict liability" in peril, gets a suspension, everyone's happy.
Except of course zillions of people on social media, who don't understand the principles, or are working hard not to. What I find astonishing is that every single account calling this a fix, or corrupt, or pointing out that someone else got a different ban (or all three) is, without exception, a Djokovic fan. Alcaraz fans, fans of Zverev, Rubley, Medvedev (I assume they exist), whatever rump of Federer and Nadal fans exist, Murray fans - none of them seems troubled. But the Djokovic fans are absolutely incensed - you can probably think of at least one account - and waste no time in trying to understand the niceties and nuance, or being accurate about what happened.
What I don't get is: why? Why is it only the Djokovic fans?
I think that's a very good point--zero suspension is an awful result for WADA, so they were really willing to take anything to avoid their own defeat. But yeah, the pre-bluster that came with it still shouldn't be necessary, I think.
isn’t the 1-2 years just the current rules? Sounds like there’s an announced change starting 2027, but the current code doesn’t really allow <1y for Sinner’s case if they find any fault or negligence.
This is mostly coming from Served last week, though she did seem to imply that the tribunal could in practice do whatever it wanted, but it sounded like anything more than 0 and <1y would be off book for the current rules they were supposed to imply
That said, WADA could have pushed a settlement sooner if they thought the rules didn’t make sense in this case