Tennis doping issue: ’Scared’, ‘stressful’, ‘political’- Players from Andrey Rublev to Jasmine Paolini open up at Madrid Masters 1000

He says he is worried about accidentally ingesting a banned substance. “As time has passed, my fear of taking anything has grown. If I’m sick, I don’t take anything because I’m afraid of testing positive later. I’m constantly asking the doctors about any medication they want to give me. There comes a time when you doubt absolutely everything, you’re truly terrified that something might happen one day, but this is how it is; you can’t think about it too much or you risk going crazy,” he said.

Alejandro Fokina, ranked 29th, also has similar concerns. “It’s very stressful. We have to be very careful, even who we touch. Because if you have a cream that would make me test positive, how do I prove later that I wasn’t using it? They’re very demanding: whoever wants to dope will appear in the results, and those of us who don’t dope are not to blame for the fact that, for example, some vitamins ‘boost our performance’.

“I think they’re being very demanding of us over the smallest things: for some it’s very beneficial, for others it’s not so beneficial. Politics rules,” Fokina said.

Similar concerns prevail in the women’s circuit post the case of Poland’s Iga Swiatek who served a one-month ban last year after testing positive for trimetazidine and proving that she took it accidentally.

The world No. 6 Jasmine Paolini spoke on the apprehensions she senses in the women’s circuit.

“Everyone is scared because you can never know everything,” the world number six commented. “We take a lot of supplements and medications when we’re sick, and we have to review everything with our doctors. We also spend a lot of time away from home, and we don’t know what we’re eating, since we sometimes eat at a buffet. It’s a complicated issue.

“I tried to do my best, which is to control everything I have in my hand, even though it’s not easy. Even if I have an open bottle and I can’t remember if it’s mine or not, I prefer not to drink it because it’s better to be safe.”