Milan, 15 Feb. (LaPresse) – ‘I had predicted that WADA would have barked and then found a solution to avoid getting into further trouble’. This was said by Sandro Donati, former coach of Alex Schwatzer, a historical figure in the fight against doping in Italy, commenting to LaPresse on the agreement reached between Jannik Sinner and WADA for the Clostebol case. ‘Wada was in a very awkward position, in a contradictory and very exposed situation because many athletes were disqualified for the same substance, for irrelevant quantities of Clostebol. It's clear that on one hand there were these people disqualified for even more than two years – he added – on the other hand there was a strong and powerful tennis player from a media point of view like Sinner who rightly defended his position because for doping purposes it was irrelevant. They risked being dragged into a real court, not a sports court, and they could be in trouble’. ‘Wada is undermined by other scandals, Navratilova's attack is emblematic as is the position of the USA who withdrew their funds with the motivation that Wada was favouring Chinese swimmers, in their opinion’, Donati recalled. ‘There are unacceptable cases of microscopic positivity that they transform into positivity and then over the years we have seen scandals such as the one in Russia, where athletes were doped directly by the state system, or the Operacion Puerto scandal in Spain, the Balco scandal in the USA’. ‘But I myself, when I was one of their consultants, examined a gigantic database which showed that, with the silent approval of WADA, no investigations were carried out on thousands of athletes with anomalous values’, said Donati.
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