Five-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek has accepted a one-month suspension after testing positive for the banned substance trimetazidine, a heart medication known as TMZ, the International Tennis Integrity Agency announced Thursday.
Swiatek failed an out-of-competition doping test in August, and the ITIA accepted his explanation that the result was unintentional and was due to contamination of an over-the-counter drug, melatonin, which Swiatek was taking for jet lag and sleep problems.
His level of fault was determined to be “at the lower end of the range of no significant fault or negligence.” ITIA said.
This is the second high-profile recent case of doping in tennis: top-ranked man Jannik Sinner failed two steroid tests in March and was cleared in August, just before the start of the US Open, in which he then participated. victory for his second Grand Slam title of the season.
Swiatek is a 23-year-old Pole who was ranked No. 1 most of the last two seasons, but is now ranked second. She won Roland-Garros in June for his fifth major championship and won a bronze medal at the Paris Olympics in early August.
Christophe Éna / AP
TMZ is the drug at the center of case involving 23 Chinese swimmers who remained eligible despite testing positive for performance enhancers in 2021.
Swiatek officially admitted the anti-doping rule violation on Wednesday and accepted his sanction.
She was already provisionally suspended from September 22 to October 4, missing three tournaments during the post-US Open hard-court swing in Asia – the Korea Open, the China Open and the Wuhan Open.
That interim ban ended after his appeal showed his test result inadvertently came from contaminated melatonin.
Because the final agreement included a one-month suspension, she will now serve the remaining eight days, while there is no competition, and will be allowed to return to play starting December 4.
Swiatek was also fined $158,944 that she won for her semifinal at the Cincinnati Open in August, the event immediately after the positive test.
“Once the origin of TMZ was established, it became clear that this was a very unusual case of a contaminated product, which is a regulated medicine in Poland. However, the product does not have the same designation globally, and the fact that a product is a regulated medicine in one country cannot in itself be enough to avoid any level of misconduct,” said Karen Moorhouse, CEO of ITIA.
“Given the nature of the drug and all the circumstances, that puts this defect at the low end of the scale,” Moorhouse said. “This case is an important reminder to tennis players of the strict liability nature of the World Anti-Doping Code and the importance of players carefully considering the use of supplements and medications.”