"These are very tricky things": Stefanos Tsitsipas not ready to 'judge' Jannik Sinner for agreeing three-month suspension with WADA

Greece’s Stefanos Tsitsipas has refused to criticise Italy’s Jannik Sinner after agreeing a three-month ban for failing two dope tests with the World Anti-Doping Agency. The 23-year-old is often regarded as one of the best players in the world in men’s tennis, but despite that, he has been in the news for the wrong reasons.

The reason is that he failed two dope tests back in March last year for the banned substance clostebol. Despite that, the reigning world number one managed to escape any ban. The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) declared him innocent following a detailed hearing where his counsel claimed that the substance was available in the player’s sample because one member of the coaching staff had received a cream for the treatment of an injury.

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WADA then appealed against the verdict in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and demanded a two-year ban for the three-time Grand Slam winner but both parties reached an agreement on Saturday. Ever since the news broke of an agreement between the two, there has been a lot of criticism on both parties, largely because of how the case was dealt with. Tsitsipas has been recently quoted in a report where he refused to criticise the Italian for the way the issue was dealt with by different bodies. The 26-year-old stated that it is hard to ‘judge’ Sinner as these things are ‘very tricky’.

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"I really can't judge him or say anything about him because I really don't know what happened,” he said. “These are very tricky things, I see people pointing fingers and saying this and that. It's a tricky situation like I have been trying to see myself in that situation- if that happened to me and knowing that, you know something else might have happened that wasn't entirely my blame. I can't really say, like, these are the type of things that I won't comment on because I am not entirely sure what's behind this.”

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