ITIA CEO reflects on the doping cases of Marketa Vondrousova, Jannik Sinner & Iga Swiatek

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**John Silk** (1:00)
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**Karen Morehouse** (1:14)
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**John Silk** (1:41)
I'm pleased to be joined today by Karen Morehouse, the CEO of the International Tennis Integrity Agency, which has been in the news a fair bit in the last couple of years, and perhaps none more so than this week, following the four-year ban administered to Marketa Vondrousova for refusing a doping test in December of last year. Karen, first of all, thanks for joining me.

**Karen Morehouse** (2:07)
Thanks for inviting me, John.

**John Silk** (2:09)
Great.
First of all, I'd like to say that, or I'd like to put to you, the video that was posted on the statement, or in addition to the statement that was released on Monday, there was a video posted yesterday. Just wondered why that video was decided to be posted yesterday, rather than maybe at the same time as the statement was being released.

**Karen Morehouse** (2:31)
So the reason we do video case explainers for some of our cases is, we really want to be transparent about different cases we deal with, so that people can understand the reasons for decisions, and hopefully they also serve an educational purpose. You'll appreciate that from the time the decision landed, we needed to finish the video to reflect the decision of the Tribunal, so inevitably that took 24 hours or so.

**John Silk** (2:58)
Yeah. Is it normal for the ITIA to produce these videos then?

**Karen Morehouse** (3:02)
We've started doing them over the last year and a half or so.
Again, it's just a real drive to want to communicate with people in a really understandable way. We've always published our decisions on our website, but I fully understand that decisions can run to 50, 60 pages, and that's a lot for people to process and understand. So producing the videos is our way of trying to make sure that we're being as transparent and making things as understandable as possible for everyone across the sport and more generally.

**John Silk** (3:33)
Karen, can you also highlight the initial refusal was in December of last year, but the ban didn't come into place until this week, I believe. Why is that six months window there for the player to potentially still play?

**Karen Morehouse** (3:50)
Yeah. So the nature of the case meant that there is no requirement under the code to impose provisional suspension. So until the hearing took place and until there was an outcome, the player remained free to play. During that time, after we received the initial notification that the test had not been completed, we did a really thorough investigation.
We spoke to the player.
We then got to the point where we charged the player. But it's then really important that the player has the time and opportunity to appropriately prepare what she wants to say for the tribunal so that all the relevant factors can be considered. And that took that six months period of time.

**John Silk** (4:33)
Is that slightly different? Is that unusual to have this sort of six month window? Or is that quite normal?

**Karen Morehouse** (4:38)
It's quite normal. In fact, it's probably compared to some doping cases relatively quick.
And that probably reflects the fact that this was a case that all turned on the facts. We deal with some cases where they're incredibly complicated from a science perspective when you get into realms of contamination and the like. And those types of cases can take much longer than this one has.