Iga Swiatek’s candid comments about being ‘treated like a liar’ after positive drugs test

Iga Swiatek has opened up about the most difficult period in her career so far as she admits her positive doping test led to fears that “everyone would turn their backs on me”.
The former world No 1’s nightmare started at the Cincinnati Open last August as she returned a positive sample for the banned substance trimetazidine.

Swiatek was allowed to continue playing following an appeal and after an investigation the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) found that she bore “no significant fault or negligence” as her sleep medication melatonin was contaminated.

The news only came to light in November when the ITIA confirmed that she had been handed a one-month suspension while she also forfeited her Cincinnati prize money and points.
In an interview with the Tennis Insider Club podcast, Swiatek described what she went through, saying: “It was terrible. Honestly, I don’t love tennis that much to feel this bad. If it would happen to me a second time, I don’t know if I would be able to go through this a second time because it was terrible, honestly.

“I couldn’t go on court for two weeks because I felt it was because of tennis that I am in this place. I felt it hit me much deeper than … it didn’t hit my ‘athlete’ side, it hit like my personal side because I thought everybody would turn their backs on me.

“I had no idea what happened, at the beginning I didn’t have a source right on. We had to send supplements to the labs and wait for the results. It was so chaotic, I didn’t know if it was going to be you know two years or three months or something else. It was really tough… I don’t want to go through this again.”

And while she is at “peace” with herself, the process left her scarred as she admits she felt like she was being treated “like liar” during the investigation process.
“You can be at peace with yourself that you didn’t do anything wrong, but no one actually treats you like that, especially the people that are prosecuting you. They want to find that even when you are telling the truth you feel like they treat you like a liar.

“But it’s the law and at the beginning it was hard for me to accept it, but my team told me from the beginning ‘don’t expect anything and don’t overthink what the outcome might be because you literally have no control over this’.

“We just tried to find the source [of the contamination] and we found it, but it wasn’t that obvious. When we had it, we just went through it step by step proving my innocence and luckily they made a pretty rational decision. In the beginning it was really scary.

“I fought so hard for everything the past few years and what if people are going to, in the head, take it away from me? What if they are going to look at me differently?
“I was home at the time and there were a lot of people coming to ask for autographs and take selfies with me. I was like ‘are you still going to be doing that in one month?’”