British tennis player Tara Moore has received a 4-year suspension, the latest twist in a long-running saga since she tested positive for nandrolone and boldenone at a tournament in Colombia in May 2022. Moore was cleared by a Sports Resolutions tribunal in December 2023, before the Court of Arbitration for Sport recently reversed this decision. Below are a few short thoughts based on this suspension.

Moore was one of three players at the same tournament to test positive for boldenone, whilst she was the only one to also test positive for nandrolone. Both substances have been found to be added to meat by Colombian farmers.

This section of the original Sports Resolutions report makes it sound like a slam-dunk contamination case:

Three players at the same tournament with the same positive, and no link between the athletes of training, coaches or agents that would often be the hallmark of athletes testing positive for the same substance together. The Sports Resolutions panel therefore determined there was no anti-doping rule violation in Moore’s case.

Before both Sports Resolutions and the CAS, the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) contended that contamination was inherently unlikely because only 25% of Colombian farmers added these substances to their cattle. I can’t help but compare this to the Shelby Houlihan case, where her contaminated meat argument was given at best a 1 in 10,000 likelihood (https://tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/7977_Award__Reasoned___FINAL__for_publication.pdf). There is of course more to each case than these figures, but on the face of it an equal ban length appears frustrating.

As I noted in my earlier piece which focused on the Sinner and Swiatek cases, it feels as if the entire anti-doping system is sleepwalking into a contamination crisis. We are seeing more and more of these cases crop up, and fans and stakeholders will continue to lose faith in the system for as long as they do.

Concern that athletes are doping and not being caught is one thing, but concern that those being banned are actually clean is much more significant. How can casual tennis fans hear about the cases of Moore, Swiatek and Sinner and trust any future ban? The Moore case in particular also adds a layer of complexity to this issue in terms of accusations of bias. It is not lost on tennis fans that two of the best tennis players in the world received a 1-month and 3-month ban, whilst the comparatively unheralded Moore has been hit with an almost career-ending 4-year ban.

The constant headlines of “Athlete banned, probably not doping” aren’t doing any good to the wider public’s faith in a working anti-doping system. And as the public lose faith in the system, the line between clean and dirty slowly fades away: there are fewer consequences for testing positive, and there are fewer benefits to remaining clean. Without this clarity and confidence, we are all worse off.