Twenty-three years after a doping case in which he was proven innocent, but which ruined part of his career, Argentine Guillermo Coria sees what is happening with Italian Jannik Sinner and regrets: he would have liked to have received the same treatment.
‘I feel I didn’t get the same treatment as him,’ Coria, current captain of the Argentine Davis Cup team, told CLAY.
Coria, who was ranked number three in the world in 2004, tested positive for nandrolone in an April 2001 test. The nandrolone entered his system through a contaminated vitamin supplement. Coria sued Universal Nutrition for ten million dollars, but eventually settled out of court.
‘Good luck to you,’ the judge told Coria at that hearing in 2007 at the New Brunswick courthouse in the US state of New Jersey.
‘The positive doping killed me, I was in my prime, then I came back with hatred,’ Coria would say years later on Argentine television. In those years, a prestigious Italian journalist had given him a malicious nickname: Nandrolino.
‘I spent my savings to bring a team of psychologists from Spain to treat me and show my personality, I also hired a lie detector in the United States, I had a genetic study that showed through my hair what you consumed, I showed how the drug entered my body, through a vitamin complex, which was not to take advantage, but when I arrived at the trial in Miami, my mind was already made up,’ he added.
The case of Sinner, world number one, has points of contact with that of Coria, but for the moment a different path: the Italian was recognised that he had no desire to dope and was allowed to continue playing. Coria was also found to have doped accidentally, but the Argentine was banned for two years, although the ATP later reduced the period to seven months.
Sinner, who twice tested positive for the anabolic drug clostebol, was allowed to continue playing, although the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) recently appealed that decision and is seeking a sanction.
At the time, the sanction was a blow to Coria, who at 19 was on the rise on the tour. After dropping to the 198th position in the world ranking, he had a great comeback. He would come close to the Roland Garros title in the remembered 2004 definition with Gaston Gaudio and play a remarkable final of the Italian Open with Rafael Nadal in 2005, but the toll he paid for that sanction was very hard.
‘It was a difficult period for me and I gave it closure, because I didn’t have a good time,’ Coria told CLAY.
As captain of the Argentine Davis Cup team, Coria will lead his players on November 21st in Malaga for the quarter-finals. The opponent? Italy, the country of Sinner.
‘The only thing I ask is that the treatment be equal for everyone,’ concluded Coria, who at 42 is married to his long-time partner Carla and has two children.
One Reply to “Guillermo Coria and the Jannik Sinner case: “I feel I didn’t get the same treatment as him””
Radhika
This article fails to provide any context about the circumstances of Coria’s positive drug test and why the facts of this case are distinguishable from the Sinner case. It simply repeats Coria’s views without any further analysis.
In early 2001, Coria, then 19, started taking multivitamins made by Universal, and in April of that year provided a urine sample which tested positive for nandrolone, a banned steroid. He was initially suspended for two years but it was reduced to seven months after an independent laboratory determined that the multivitamin was contaminated with nandrolone and other steroids.
Thus, Coria, like Halep, consumed a substance, unlike Sinner who was unaware of the substance that was on his trainer’s hand before he was massaged. It also took time to identify the source of the contamination – which required much more testing to isolate and identified as compared to the ready identification of the source of Sinner’s contamination.
Although it is understandable why Coria would express wanting to be treated the same as Sinner, there facts of his case are significantly different to Sinner’s and there is no possibility of him being treated the same. The level of of his responsibility is obviously higher – he ingested the multivitamin and failed to take care of its contents – as it was not intentional doping he had to prove no fault or negligence and managed to do so to some extent but the 7m suspension indicated that he was considered to have some responsibility in failing to take reasonable care in what he consumed and the risk of ingesting banned substances.
The WADA appeal in Sinner’s case will test the boundaries of what constitutes reasonable care by an athlete in circumstances involving members of a player’s staff who were responsible for the positive drug test in Sinner’s case. The Independent tribunal found that he had taken reasonable steps to ensure his staff were cognisant of anti-doping protocol. WADA is testing that. The question of Sinner’s responsibility in this case is what CAS will determine.
Players often say there needs to be consistent treatment and misinterpret a different outcome as being the result of inconsistent treatment when in truth the law has been applied consistently to a different set of facts. This happens in any legal system where the law and principles are consistently applied but where a different set of facts results in a different outcome.