There was a horrible war in the Balkans, yes, but compared to 2024, the world of the mid-’90s was boring and optimistic, a world of do-gooders that also permeated sport. If history was over, according to Francis Fukuyama, it was better to concentrate on being good, on being fair. There were no longer great feats, the bulk of humanity’s duties were underway. Hunting doped athletes was, thus, a shot of endorphins and a good conscience for fans and journalists unable to achieve greater heroism.
That January 14, 1997, when the first doping case became known, the name of Ignacio Truyol was not familiar to practically any journalist in the world, except for a few Spaniards: There were many players to take care of when focusing on Spanish tennisfrom Sergi Bruguera to the Sánchez Vicario brothers, through Conchita Martínez or imminent stars like Carlos Moyá and Alex Corretja.
But from one day to the next, Truyol became famous: his name was in the headlines of absolutely everyone, replicated again and again thanks to international news agencies, cables that in turn had an impact on the great television information service of those years, CNNand on the news of each country.
There is doping in tennis! Everything that was suspected, that was whispered about, that was expected to ever happen, was finally there. And he was a Spaniard, a fact that fit perfectly with the prejudices (and needs) of the Anglo-Saxon and French world.the eternal political power in tennis beyond the results that its players have or not.
The urgent bulletin of large agencies such as the American AP, the British Reuters, the French AFP or the German dpa said, words more, words less, the following: “Spaniard Ignacio Truyol became the first tennis player suspended for drug use when he tested positive for an anabolic steroid and a stimulant.. Truyol, 23 years old and number 127 in the ranking, denies having abused prohibited substances, which he says a Spanish doctor prescribed to him to treat a back injury. The drugs were nandrolone, an anabolic steroid, and pemoline, a stimulant.”
A new world of terms that were both suggestive and unknown was opening up, and would never be closed again: prohibited substances, medical, drugs, nandrolone, anabolic steroid, pemoline, stimulant.
That world must have sounded familiar to any sports fan, those with the most memory and precision could even write the word “stanozolol” without errors and remember Ben Johnsonthat of the superb image, of turning the neck before crossing the finish line to celebrate in the face of Carl Lewis an Olympic gold that would not last long.
That had been in 1988 in Seoul, 15 months before the fall of the Berlin Wall: Johnson represented the last great manifestation, in this case Canadian, of a school, that of doping, in which almost all the countries after the Iron Curtain. But that was in athletics, in gymnastics, in wrestling, in weightlifting, in swimming. Not in tennis! Not in that sport devoted to elegance and chivalry in which, coincidentally or not, the Soviet Union had had very little to say in its 71 years of existence.
The point was that Truyol had tested positive, and that news broke out in a tennis very different from the cases that shake it today, those of Jannik Sinner and Iga Swiatek.
The head of the ATP tour was Mark Miles, an affable American from Indianapolis who was in charge for 15 years, between 1990, the year the ATP Tour was born, and 2005.
With Miles you could pass each other in the hallways and talk without much problem. Miles enjoyed contact with journalists and cultivated it in each tournamentso different from what happens today with Andrea Gaudenzi, the Italian sheltered behind multiple barriers. Everything was so much more natural back then.
Which did not mean that Miles, today CEO of IndyCar, was a saint. In the sharp interview that Nacho Encabo does with Relevo, Truyol says something key: that the ATP proposed to him to hide his positive, to pretend that it did not exist.
“A hidden sanction in which you lose the ranking, you say that you are injured and absolutely nothing would happen,” he explained.
In that same 1997 when Truyol’s positive test was known, Andre Agassi became addicted to methamphetamine, “crystal meth.” When he tested positive, he sat down to write a letter to the ATP. A letter “full of lies interspersed with pieces of truth”, according to Agassi himself. Among the lies, one that would return to the foreground eight years later: that he had accidentally drank a soda with “crystal meth” that belonged to his assistant, known as Slim, who took drugs.
To that story, that of the contaminated glass whose contents are taken by accident, The Argentine Mariano Puerta also appealed in 2005 after the positive result of the 2005 Roland Garros final against Rafael Nadal.
A Nadal who in 2009 was furious with Agassi’s confession. What the American had revealed was “fatal”, it was a “lack of respect” and it did “damage to the sport”.
A debatable analysis of the Mallorcan, summarized in this phrase: “Why are you coming to say that now because you are retired and it is a way of harming the sport without any sense”.
The truth is that Agassi deceived the ATP, but it is even more true that the ATP was fooled. Gladly, opening his arms and almost asking for help to hide the story. The ATP did not want, for anything in the world, to announce Agassi’s positive result. And he did it, until the former player took advantage of the story to add more millions of dollars to his account, turning the story of “crystal meth” into one of the axes of “Open”, his autobiography.
Truyol says he was not surprised by the Agassi case. “Basically we already knew,” he says, in a somewhat diffuse and open-ended phrase. And adds: “That worked in the way that if they wanted they would sanction you and if they didn’t want they wouldn’t sanction you”.
That is true, as it is true that almost everyone sought to deceive. The players to the ATP and the ATP to the public and its sponsors. If not, just pay attention to this question from Encabo and Truyol’s answer.
– Were you aware that you could test positive?
– No, I had no idea. I wouldn’t have gone to the tournament. Basically, I got that, I wasn’t told about it and we went to the tournament and I tested positive.. But I’m telling you, we all knew that there were anti-doping controls in that tournament, so if I had known, I obviously wouldn’t have gone.
And if it didn’t go, there was no positive, because in most of the circuit no controls were carried out. Thus, anti-doping control was more of a lottery than a system. Today this is no longer the case, and Spanish tennis became professional to avoid what happened to the Argentine in the 2000s, a succession of doping cases.. It would not have been possible without Dr. Ángel Ruiz Cotorro.
But the doping lottery continues to work in tennis. How to get the winning number? Securing a good lawyer, something that the Truyols of this world generally do not have, but the Sinners and Swiateks do.
