Andy Roddick came out firing at the team around Jannik Sinner as the world’s top-ranked player is scrutinized amid positive steroid tests.
In a very convoluted situation, Sinner came back positive for an anabolic steroid on two different tests, but was cleared after the International Tennis Integrity Agency concluded that the banned substance entered his body by accident through a massage.
Roddick had a long conversation about the controversy on his “Served” podcast with Jon Wertheim.
Acknowledging all the uncertainty around the story and saying that the world at-large is good at “headlines” but not “nuance” now, Roddick explained his opinion on the situation.
“I think it’s negligence by members of his team. I think it’s a gross mistake,” Roddick said.
“I don’t know how you can have anything like that near someone without having checked it out. The other thing, I’m going to throw his trainer completely under the bus, there was an Italian Basketball League, before he took the job with Jannik, someone got suspended for a year because their wife was using this spray, with that exact substance, and it got onto them.”
Roddick continued to say that, “If you are in orbit, and know that that happened, and it’s an easily-detectable substance, and you still have it on your finger — listen, I don’t know what that situation is, maybe Jannik is more forgiving than I would have been.”
Earlier in the conversation, Roddick had talked about how everybody knows how strict tennis testing protocols are.
“So, tennis has probably the largest list of banned substances, comparatively speaking, to every other sport. Like, I can buy, stuff that you’ve had, athlete’s foot stuff that we can’t use, Sudafed we can’t use,” Roddick said.
“Anything in a CVS that you walk in and get for any cold, 80 percent of it, we would probably test positive if we took it. So, two things, one, very stringent, something you have to think about. Two, not sure how this substance got anywhere near him.
“If it was any question about [taking] anything [potentially suspect], it was like, ‘No.’”