2 Hare Court | London Barristers Chambers - One of the UK's leading sets
Blogs 31/01/2025

The Professional Tennis Players’ Association (PTPA) – set up by Novak Djokovic and Vasek Pospisil in 2020 to advocate the rights of tennis players – has announced the launch of the Athlete Counsel & Equity (ACE) Program, aimed at providing tennis players with “equitable access to world-class legal expertise, regardless of a player’s financial standing and personal resources”. The Program has been launched amidst a series of recent controversial decisions in anti-doping cases.

Men’s world number one Jannik Sinner is currently awaiting the outcome of an appeal being brought by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) against a finding that he bore no fault or negligence for having the steroid Clostebol in his system. Meanwhile WADA announced that it will not appeal against the decision to impose a one-month ban on five-time women’s Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek, after she was found to have the prohibited substance Trimetazidine in her system. Britain’s own Tara Moore (who also co-founded the initiative) is set to contest an appeal brought by the ITIA against a decision that she bore no fault or negligence in respect of the presence of Nandrolone and Boldenone in her system.

The anti-doping regulatory framework is such that once it has been demonstrated that a prohibited substance is present in an athlete’s system (an ‘Adverse Analytical Finding’), the burden shifts to the athlete concerned to prove, on the balance of probabilities that they did not act intentionally and (if they can do that) did not bear any fault or negligence, in order to avoid a substantial ban from sport. Doing that usually requires the athlete to establish exactly how the prohibited substance came to be in their system: a difficult task when the athlete’s claim is that the prohibited substance must have come from some form of contamination of food or supplements which they did not know about. That burden on athletes can mean, some critics would argue, that well-financed athletes, who have greater resources both to manage and catalogue their food and supplement intake, and to muster the legal and scientific expertise to defend such cases, are at a marked advantage. The ACE Program is perhaps an attempt to re-balance those scales. 

Athletes facing allegations of anti-doping and anti-corruption rule violations who have limited financial means – often the reality for all but the top tier of athletes in many sports – are able to call upon the services of the pro bono panel run by Sport Resolutions. But even this service is often limited to athletes being assisted by pro bono counsel acting alone through direct access. By contrast, the ACE Program involves a partnership between the PTPA and US law firms King & Spalding LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP.

Given the hugely damaging impact significant bans can have on the lives and livelihoods of athletes, athletes’ organisations in sports other than tennis may look to the example of the ACE Program. It will be interesting to see whether those organisations in the sports most frequently subjected to allegations of doping and corruption will follow suit, in an attempt to help those who would otherwise struggle to resource their legal defence.

Blogs 31/01/2025

Authors / Speakers

Amina Graham

Call 2008

Related Expertise

Popular news

Nneka Akudolu prosecutes Kadian Nelson for offences of rape and kidnap of a 13 year old girl

On the 3rd November 2020, Kadian Nelson abducted and raped a 13 year old girl…

R v Broughton Clarifying Causation in Gross Negligence Manslaughter

SUMMARY In 2017 a 24-year-old woman, Louella Fletcher Michie, died at the Bestival Music Festival,…

Portfolio Builder

Select the practice areas that you would like to download or add to the portfolio

Download    Add to portfolio   
Portfolio
Title Type CV Email

Remove All

Download


Click here to share this shortlist.
(It will expire after 30 days.)