ROME -- In normal circumstances, anticipation of the US Open in New York City prompts nothing more serious than predictions about who will win the men’s and women’s titles. For Italian fans, the pressing issue would be whether Jannik Sinner can add another Grand Slam to his Australian Open title. For Serbia’s Novak Djokovic, the question is whether at the age of 37 he’s capable of winning a record-breaking 25^th Grand Slam.

 But this is not a normal year. And the buzz at Flushing Meadow centers on a single subject. It has recently been revealed that Jannik Sinner twice tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug last March at Indian Wells. According to the Code of Conduct, he should have been suspended for two years. Instead, his drug test results remained secret for six months, and when they were revealed it was simultaneously announced that tennis authorities had decided that he wasn’t responsible for this rule infraction.

 The drug, Clostebol, an anabolic steroid, was said to have entered his system in minuscule amounts during a massage by his physiotherapist who supposedly had Clostebol on his hands. Although Sinner was penalized with a fine and a loss of ranking points from his results at Indian Wells, he was deemed to be innocent and therefore free to play at the US Open. This has sparked nonstop debate and scandal-mongering by the press with incessant claims that the situation is somehow unprecedented and not at all representative of the image professional tennis likes to project of itself.

 In fact, this entire episode repeats in almost every detail previous controversies. For anyone who has followed tennis even on a casual basis, there is something wearingly familiar about positive drug tests followed by adamant denials, impassioned appeals to the court of public opinion and ever changing defense pleas to the authorities. To put things in perspective, let me offer a Short History of Drugs in Tennis.

 In March 2009 at a tournament in Key Biscayne, Florida, Richard Gasquet tested positive for cocaine. His instant reaction was disbelief and denial. He swore he had never used drugs and added that he knew nobody on the circuit who did. By late May, Gasquet announced that he intended to file an appeal to overturn his two-year suspension. In L’Equipe, the French sports newspaper of record, he explained that he had violated his normally monastic training routine and gone clubbing in Miami. He insisted he had had just a couple of drinks and suspected somebody must have spiked them. Why? He couldn’t say. Who? He couldn’t guess.

 Rafael Nadal rushed to Gasquet’s defense and suggested that his French friend may have kissed a cocaine user. As an excuse, that ranks up there with “the dog ate my homework.” It led joking reporters to observe that perhaps Gasquet had kissed Martina Hingis, who recently tested positive for cocaine and retired rather than fight a two-year suspension. But Gasquet refused to withdraw quietly like the demure Swiss. He vowed to keep battling and by Wimbledon he had discarded the spiked-drink defense and fastened on the cocaine-kiss defense. Suddenly he remembered snogging a girl in Miami, Pamela (no last name). She was said to be a cocaine user by some sources. Tennis fans began holding their breath waiting for a decision on Gasquet’s appeal.

 With the advent of the professional era in tennis in 1968 there were no drug tests. Users stood little chance of getting caught, and because omertà operated then just as it does now on the circuit, nobody did much more than gossip about the subject. Even journalists who witnessed players doing drugs didn’t feel compelled to report it. Gene Scott, the late publisher of Tennis Week, always defended this practice, maintaining in his magazine that what a journalist saw in a social setting should remain off limits. 

 But in September, 1980, Yannick Noah broke the silence in an interview with Rock & Folk, a French magazine similar to Rolling Stone. He admitted that he smoked hashish, and accused other players of using cocaine. What’s more – and in his opinion what was worse – some were popping amphetamines. This infuriated him because it put clean players at a disadvantage. He lamented that they might have to use coke or amphetamines to stay competitive with drug abusers. He wanted to bring the problem into the open. If it weren’t discussed, Noah feared there might be deaths from overdoses.

 Tennis authorities and the press savaged Noah for smoking hashish.  His remarks about coke and speed were ignored, as were the players whom he said “take the hit during a tournament and crash afterward.”  He mentioned Bjorn Borg and Victor Pecci by name.

 A year later, Arthur Ashe proposed in his syndicated column that tennis should start testing for drugs.  During the 1982 US Open Ashe told me that the ATP had “established a relationship with this organization called Comp-Care. Comp-Care will, for free, help you deal with your drug problems anonymously.”

  At Ashe’s encouragement, I called Comp-Care which referred me to Dr. Robert B. Millman, Director of the Drug and Alcohol Abuse program at the Cornell University Medical College in New York City. A psychiatrist as well as an internist, Dr. Millman said he was treating a variety of professional athletes, including an unspecified number of tennis players. When I asked whether drugs were a problem on the circuit, he answered, “Absolutely.”  The money and glamour of the game, he explained, brought players into frequent contact with celebrities who were heavy cocaine users.  Many players succumbed to peer pressure or turned to drugs to reduce stress.

 Dr. Millman said that a few players took heroin, snorting it, not shooting it. He wasn’t convinced that players confined cocaine to recreational use. Though he conceded he couldn’t prove it, he had heard of players taking cocaine for a lift during matches. But for someone who wanted to improve his game dramatically, amphetamines had quicker results. As Dr. Millman put it, “Speed makes you better.” But then, “It makes you worse.”

 When I published this interview in my book, Short Circuit, in 1983, tennis authorities responded with an across the board denial and a series of personal attacks. I was physically removed from the Press Box at the Italian Open, roughed up and threatened by a tournament director and IMG agent. For years I was refused press credentials at tournaments.

 It wasn’t until the mid-80s that tennis accepted international rules against drug use. Out-of-competition testing was initiated, and rule breakers were sanctioned. But it was too late to deal with a constellation of juiced-up stars.  In various books, player memoirs and investigative articles it had been revealed that Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, Vitas Gerulaitas and Pat Cash, winners of a combined total of 20 Grand Slam titles, had used cocaine in the 70s and early 80s. During a comeback in the early 90s, Mats Wilander also tested positive for cocaine, adding his seven Grand Slam titles to the legacy of “the coke generation.”

 Some apologists argued that cocaine is a recreational drug, not a performance enhancer. But it’s a stimulant, and that’s why tennis banned it. Furthermore, in almost all jurisdictions, buying and selling cocaine is illegal which meant players had to deal with criminals, which made them vulnerable to blackmail.

 By the time, however, that stories started circulating about cocaine in tennis, the game had more powerful performance enhancers to worry about. Anabolic steroids, human growth hormones, EPO and a witch’s brew of powerful elixirs hit the black market. Australian Open champion Czech Petr Korda tested positive, as did a gaggle of other Europeans – Stefan Koubek, Karol Beck, Filippo Volandri -- and South Americans Juan Ignacio Chela, Guillermo Canas, Guillermo Coria and Mariano Puerta. The latter two made it to the French Open final after serving suspensions for drug use. At Roland Garros in 2005, Puerta had the dubious distinction of testing positive a second time and receiving a career-ending suspension.

 In 1996 when Boris Becker speculated that the hyperactive Austrian Thomas Muster must be on something, the German was disciplined for his injudicious remarks. Sticking to its policy of punishing the messenger, tennis authorities also cracked down hard in 2002 on Frenchman Nicholas Escude who said, just as Yannick Noah had done 20 years earlier, that it was obvious when players were juiced. All you had to do was look at their bodies and their eyes. Moreover, Escude charged that some players had tested positive, but the ATP hadn’t revealed the results.

 Dismissed at first as a pop-off with no basis for his accusations, Escude was vindicated when it was belatedly disclosed that between August 2002 and May 2003 seven players had tested positive for nandrolone, and fifty-three others had showed elevated traces for nandrolone or its precursors. Only one of these players was identified – Bodhan Ulirach of the Czech Republic – and suspended for two years.

 But when a second player came before the tribunal, he argued that he had taken electrolyte replacement pills provided by ATP trainers. Submitting two dozen legal affidavits, the player contended that the electrolyte tablets must have been contaminated with nandrolone. The other players who had tested positive promptly adopted the same defense.

 Normally, under the ATP’s policy of strict liability, a player is responsible for whatever is in his system. Even if he ingests a banned substance unknowingly, he is penalized -- although the penalty may be reduced if there are extenuating circumstances. In this instance, because the ATP might have supplied contaminated supplements, the burden of proof switched, and players maintained that it was up to the ATP to prove that the pills weren’t tainted.

 The ATP had been providing these products at tournaments for over 20 years with no problems and no complaints. Even so, it analyzed 500 tablets that were believed to have been available at a tournament where positive or elevated tests had occurred. No contaminants were discovered. The ATP submitted the remaining jars in its possession for further analysis. Representative samples from these jars revealed no contamination. In short, there was never any scientific proof that the ATP electrolytes were contaminated and no evidence that the players in question had consumed them. Yet Ulirach was retroactively pardoned, even though he had never previously cited electrolyte replacements as a factor in his positive test, and cases against the other six players were dropped.

  By May 2003, the ATP had stopped distributing electrolyte replacements. News of this was widely disseminated in the press, and notices were posted in player locker rooms and announced in the players’ newsletter. More than two months later, however, Greg Rusedski, a Canadian transplanted to England, tested positive. Invoking the same defense as previous players, he claimed that the ATP, not he, was responsible. Though there was still no proof that the electrolytes had been contaminated or that Rusedski had ever taken them, and no explanation of how Rusedski had been tainted by supplements that had already been removed from the locker room, the tribunal decreed that his case too deserved to be dismissed.

 Dick Pound, head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, called the decision “preposterous. . .  It defies imagination.”

 David Howman, director general of WADA, pointed out, “It’s unprecedented to have a series of positive results where the individuals have been exonerated and the sport has chosen to fall on its own sword. . .  It undermines the whole principle of the anti-doping program.”

 In the early months of 2004, sixteen more players showed elevated test results for nandrolone, with the same analytic fingerprint as the previous positives. According to the ATP, these players hailed from a dozen different countries, and their test results occurred at tournaments at different times in different parts of the world. Since there was no question now of contaminated ATP supplements, what explained these troubling elevated scores?

 No explanation has ever been offered. Except for Ulirach and Rusedski, none of the other players involved in this has ever been identified. And naturally tennis fans have no way of knowing whether any of the six unnamed players won tournaments, perhaps even Grand Slam titles, with the help of banned substances.  

 As for Richard Gasquet, an independent anti-doping tribunal decided in July 2009 to reduce his suspension to two and a half months. In effect, the penalty became the time he had already been off the tour. The International Tennis Federation appealed and asked the Court of Arbitration for Sport to re-impose the original two-year ban. But in the end, Gasquet was free to resume his career, and other drug related cases came and went, calling into question tennis’ commitment to rule enforcement and public transparency. 

 In 2009, Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open, contained an extraordinary confession.  Andre admitted using crystal meth, snorting it with a Vegas friend called Slim. In 1997, he had tested positive at a tournament and faced public exposure and suspension. But in a series of flabbergasting events, Andre wrote a letter to the ATP claiming that he had mistakenly drunk one of Slim’s sodas that had been spiked with meth. The ATP accepted this bogus plea of innocence, never questioning Andre or Slim, and never making any public comment, much less an apology, after Agassi confessed to hoodwinking the game’s drug enforcement officials.

 In this context, it’s difficult to predict what crazy bends and elbows Jannik Sinner’s story will take. Only one thing seems certain. The imbroglio will surely affect his play at the US Open.