"You can get contaminated by doing harmless things"- Amid Iga Swiatek & Jannik Sinner doping controversies, WADA Director makes interesting revelation

Jannik Sinner and Iga Swiatek's shocking doping revelations have rocked the tennis world in recent months. Recently, the director of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Olivier Niggli, shared his take on the "contamination problem" that exists not only in tennis, but professional sports in general.

Sinner's case surfaced in the build up to this year's US Open. The Italian had twice tested positive for the prohibited substance Clostebol earlier in the year, but successfully proved to an ITIA-appointed independent tribunal that the exposure was accidental. However, WADA later intervened and appealed the decision, with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) set to hear WADA's appeal in 2025.

More recently, it became public knowledge that Iga Swiatek had tested positive for trimetazidine (TMZ) in September. The Pole was given a provisional suspension leading to her ineligibility at three events during the Asian hardcourt swing. She later accepted a one-month ban, which will end on December 4.

Amid these controversial developments, Olivier Niggli, the WADA Director, has acknowledged that there is an issue involving contamination in sports. However, he attributed this to the technological advancements in laboratories that are resulting in even the most negligible contamination cases being reported.

"Today there is a contamination problem. This does not mean that there are more cases of this kind than in the past, the fact is that laboratories are more efficient in detecting even infinitesimal quantities of substances. The quantities are so small that you can get contaminated by doing harmless things. The truth is that we hear a lot of stories and I understand the public opinion that can end up thinking that we take everything," Niggli told L'Equipe.

The WADA director went on to suggest an idea, which, if implemented, could potentially see the number of cases concerning contamination in trace amounts coming down.

"With thresholds we would not have seen all these cases. What we need to understand is whether we are ready to accept microdosing and where it is right to stop. A working table will be created precisely for this type of reflection. A table that should therefore - in light of the analyses of the quantities found in the cases of recent years and obviously making distinctions based on the substance - define those limit quantities," Niggli concluded.

Both Sinner and Swiatek's positive tests revealed that there were only trace amounts of Clostebol and TMZ respectively, in their bloodstreams.

Nick Kyrgios, the controversial Australian who condemned Sinner after the news of the Italian's Clostebol-positive tests broke, spoke out against Iga Swiatek as well.

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Nick Kyrgios aired his frustrations amid Iga Swiatek's doping row

Nick Kyrgios (Source: Getty)

News of Iga Swiatek testing positive for TMZ did not sit well with Nick Kyrgios, who took to X (formerly Twitter) and shared multiple posts, criticizing the state of tennis and sports at large.

"Our sport is cooked," Kyrgios wrote first.

"The excuse that we can all use is that we didn’t know. Simply didn’t know. Professionals at the highest level of sport can now just say “we didn’t know," he wrote in a separate post later.

Not long after Kyrgios made his feelings clear about Iga Swiatek's doping controversy, reports surfaced suggesting that he will not be the Pole's teammate at the upcoming World Tennis League exhibition team tennis event.