AILSA CHANG, HOST:
There's a cloud hanging over the U.S. Open. The Grand Slam tennis tournament starts Monday in New York - the final slam of the season. And the top seed on the men's side, Jannik Sinner, revealed earlier this week that he had tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug. Sinner has been cleared to compete next week, but, obviously, questions remain. NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan joins us now to explain more. Hey, Becky.
BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Hey, there.
CHANG: OK, so tell us more about what we know about Sinner.
SULLIVAN: Yeah. So Sinner - he's a 23-year-old Italian player. He's had a very good 2024. And it was revealed this week that, two times in March, about a week apart, he tested positive for low levels of this drug called clostebol, which is an antabolic steroid - a synthetic version of testosterone. And it's banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency. And here in the U.S., it's a controlled substance. It does have medical uses in dermatology - skin care, especially.
CHANG: OK.
SULLIVAN: And in Italy, which is where Sinner is from, you can buy it over the counter as, like, a cream or a spray. And so what Sinner and his team claims happened is that his physical therapist cut his finger while they were all together at a tournament earlier this year. Someone else on Sinner's entourage gave the PT a spray that had the drug in it, and the PT used the spray to treat his own cut. And then he went on to give just daily treatment, massages, etc., to Sinner all week, apparently without washing his hands first, without wearing gloves. And as a result, they say Sinner tested positive for clostebol.
CHANG: OK, is that even plausible?
SULLIVAN: So yeah - so the agency that oversees doping in tennis - they were reviewing this. They had a panel of three independent experts look over the claims, and all of those experts said that this was believable. And one made the important point that the amount is so low that this expert believed it wouldn't have had any relevant performance-enhancing effect on Sinner.
I spoke today to John Gleaves - he's a professor of kinesiology at Cal State Fullerton who tracks these kinds of doping cases - to get his take. And he told me that this particular drug, clostebol, has come up over and over again with Italian athletes because it's so readily available there.
JOHN GLEAVES: Italy is one of the countries where they see the most clostebol positives from. And as an Italian athlete with Italian medical staff, you would think they would be aware of this issue and be a little more mindful to avoid that kind of contamination.
SULLIVAN: On the other hand, he says, like, these kinds of cases - not just with Sinner, but other athletes in other sports - are coming up a lot more as testing technology has essentially just gotten so sophisticated that labs can detect really vanishingly small amounts of drugs, as they did in this case. But there are still zero-tolerance policies in sports, and so this kind of thing, he says, is just going to keep happening.
CHANG: Well, what are Sinner's competitors saying about all of this?
SULLIVAN: It's been a very big subject of conversation in tennis this week...
CHANG: I imagine.
SULLIVAN: ...Because Sinner is currently the top-ranked player in the world. He's had a terrific year, as we were saying. And the news came out the day after he had won another tournament, the Cincinnati Open, earlier this week. So I think a big complaint folks have had is just how this had been kept totally under wraps until this week, even though the tests were back in March. And that's just in contrast to some - how some other big cases have been handled in the past, one example being Maria Sharapova, who was suspended for more than a year while her own doping case was being investigated.
CHANG: OK, well, beyond this drug controversy, I just want to talk about the action on the court. Give us a preview of the U.S. Open.
SULLIVAN: Yeah. So on the men's side, you do have Sinner as the top seed. He plays for the first time on Tuesday. And there's a ton of strong contenders in the men's bracket, including the Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz, who could meet Sinner in the semifinal. And then on the other side of the bracket is the perennial great Novak Djokovic, who just won Olympic gold medal this summer, and he has a relatively easier path through his side.
And then in the women's tournament, it's really wide open. I think a U.S. favorite will be Coco Gauff. She won the U.S. Open last year and had a good start to her year this year, but she looked a little weak at the Olympics this summer, so it's hard to know what to expect from her this time around. But she is the third seed, and her first match will be Monday.
CHANG: That is NPR's Becky Sullivan. Thank you, Becky.
SULLIVAN: You're so welcome.
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