Like in tennis, you don’t wanna miss.
For The Athletic, Charlie Eccleshare examined the paranoia of top tennis players in the wake of Yannick Sinner and Iga Swiatek’s bans [archived link]:
“You’re freaking out,” Jessica Pegula, last year’s U.S. Open runner-up, told reporters in April. “I know there are a lot of girls who don’t sleep. Just lying in bed, making sure the doorbell works, every single phone is on — it can be very stressful.”
Lucky for Sinner and Swiatek, they got light bans and got to come back as if nothing happened. Not so much for players lower down the rankings whether they’ve taken drugs or not. In fact, some players just call it quits like Mikael Ymer, who retired from professional tennis after losing an appeal against an 18-month suspension for missing 3 tests. There’s a culture of inconsistency not just in tennis but other sports when it comes to anti-doping (see also Russia’s doping ban that got reduced to 2 years after a panel u-turn and seemingly for no reason).