ITF (TADP) Q4/21 Quarterly Report, 2021 Per Player Statistics, and ITIA taking over responsibility for TADP

With the French Open being less than a week away, it is a good time to look at several recent developments considering the TADP (Tennis Anti-Doping Programme).

First of all, the quarterly report for Q4/2021 has been released. Much to anyone’s surprise, Q4/21 is the second quarter in a row to surpass the number of samples collected of the same quarter of 2019. Q3/21‘s 1,902 samples already marked a significant increase compared to Q3/19‘s 1,692, and Q4/21 continues this trend by outnumbering Q4/19 by 75 samples. At the same time, at a total of 2 samples collected throughout 2021, in-competition blood testing is still effectively suspended, for reasons unknown. By now, the impact of Covid-19 on testing as a blanket excuse no longer holds, as there has been ample time to properly account for that as part of testing protocols. Hence, while the quantity has gone up, the quality of testing most certainly has gone down. Furthermore, if we’re looking at the entirety of 2021, the total number of samples collected has gone down by 15% (rounded) compared to 2019, with numbers being lower across the board. In summary, the TADP fails to even meet the low level of pre-pandemic testing efficacy.

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As of 2022, the TADP is now no longer under the direct supervision of the ITF. Instead, responsibility for the TADP has been relegated to the ITIA (International Tennis Integrity Agency). The ITIA has been established as an allegedly independent governing body whose funding is provided by its seven stakeholders, which are the ITF, ATP, WTA, and the four Grand Slams, each providing funding equal to one seventh of the total budget. As part of the ITIA annual review of 2021, one is granted a look at the total budget of the TADP, which hasn’t been publically available before:

As you can see, the budget for both 2020 and 2021 has been $5.7 million. For comparison, the budget for cycling’s anti-doping efforts for 2021 has been $7.5 million. Yet, despite the budget being just 32% higher (rounded, for 2021), cycling managed to collect more than 19,000 samples (source) in 2019, as compared to just 7,773 samples collected by the TADP during the same year. Furthermore, cycling’s anti-doping programme has been able to maintain operations almost fully during 2020, where the decline in in-competition testing is virtually exclusively due to the cancellation of events, while the volume per event has remained the same (source). By contrast, the TADP not only saw a significant reduction of in-competition testing, but also of out-of-competition testing during 2020. In short, it is fair to say that cycling’s anti-doping is far superior to that of tennis, to an almost startling degree. In addition to that, given that the TADP effectively stopped functioning throughout the entirety of 2020, one has to wonder whether the allocated budget for 2020 has even been used up, and what happened to the funds not spent on testing, as those clearly didn’t go into ramping up testing for 2021.

For 2022, the integrated budget of the ITIA is meant to increase by $1.7 million over the non-integrated budgets for 2021. Of course, it remains to be seen whether this increase will in fact benefit the anti-doping efforts. So far, the anti-corruption efforts not only are better funded, but also received substantially higher funding in 2021 compared to 2020, whereas the TADP continued to operate under the same budget. It seems reasonable to assume that the TADP in fact may not limited by its budget, but rather by its ability (and possibly willingness) to effectively test players.

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Lastly, the TADP has released the per-player testing statistics for 2021. As with previous years, one can compare the number of events attented by a player to the number of in-competition tests conducted. An important distinction in this regard is the one between tests and testing missions. The TADP merely lists tests or samples, and since urine tests, blood tests, and ABP blood tests are counted individually, a single testing mission can include up to three testing samples. Accordingly, the following numbers represent a best-case scenario, where only a single test has been collected during a testing mission. In reality, it seems likely that multiple tests were collected, lowering the ratio between testing missions and events attended even further. Looking at the male and female Top 5 (end of year), the following observations can be made.

• Novak Djokovic (1): Tested at 8 out of 11 events (73%)
• Daniil Medvedev (2): 7 out of 17 (41%)
• Alexander Zverev (3): 8 out of 18 (44%)
• Stefanos Tsitsipas (4): 9 out of 21 (43%)
• Andrey Rublev (5): 10 out of 22 (45%)

• Ashleigh Barty (1): 5 out of 13 (38%)
• Aryna Sabalenka (2): 9 out of 19 (47%)
• Garbiñe Muguruza (3): 5 out of 19 (26%)
• Karolína Plíšková (4): 6 out of 18 (33%)
• Barbora Krejčíková (5) 11 out of 17 (65%)

In summary, aside from two exceptions, the TADP seems to prefer not testing even their top players at at least half of their events. This of course applies to Carlos Alcaraz as well, who has been tested at 6 out of 18 events (33%) in 2021, and not once out-of-competition. The same Carlos Alcaraz who looked like this in late 2020:

Only to look like this in 2021, barely six months later:

Once again, the testing in tennis proves to be exceptionally rigorous.