TENNIS/Greg Rusedski drugs case: Yesterday Greg Rusedski learned that he is free to resume what remains of his career with his reputation restored. The same cannot be said for the governing body which cleared him.

For the ATP, the implications of the decision belatedly handed down by an independent tribunal could not be more serious: the ATP now stands charged with failing to enforce its own anti-doping code.

The not-guilty verdict leaves the credibility of its anti-doping measures in tatters and the governing body facing serious questions about its ability to administer the men's game. From locker-room to court house, the Rusedski saga has exposed the ATP's anti-doping procedures as deficient.

The crisis precipitated by the verdict has its roots in the flood of positive nandrolone samples collected by ATP anti-doping officials between September 2002 and May 2003. Among the players to test positive was Bohdan Ulihrach, a Czech journeyman.

Ulihrach claimed that electrolyte supplements contaminated with nandrolone and administered by ATP trainers were responsible for his positive test. The ATP agreed and he was cleared on appeal. Six other players were exonerated on the same grounds, and the governing body announced that trainers had been ordered to stop administering the apparently contaminated pills.

The distribution ceased in May 2003, according to the ATP, but Rusedski's positive sample was not given until July, and the nandrolone "fingerprint" matched the earlier positives. Either the supplements were not the source of the nandrolone, in which case Ulihrach and six others should not have been cleared, or the pills are still in distribution, which raises doubts about the ATP's control of its trainers.

"Mr Rusedski took exactly the same substances and attributed his finding, also, to material given to him by the ATP," his lawyers maintained yesterday. "As such he argued that it was unfair that the ATP should seek to prosecute him for substances which they themselves had given him, and which in all probability had caused him to test positive."

How the ATP gets out of the mess it has created remains to be seen. In accepting the contamination defence of Rusedski and the others, it has abandoned the basic principle of strict liability, under which athletes are responsible for whatever is in their systems regardless of the source.

Ulihrach and now Rusedski were cleared under the obscure legal doctrine of estoppel, which "prevents a person from adopting a position inconsistent with an earlier position if it results in injury to someone else". In translation, this means it was unfair of the ATP to ban players for taking in good faith drugs administered by the governing body. Though this may appear a common-sense approach, it sets tennis apart from other Olympic sports governed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code.

The agency's director-general, Dave Howman, said yesterday the ATP panel had acted appropriately in clearing Rusedski, but he added WADA remained seriously concerned about the number of positive nandrolone tests on the men's circuit.

The ATP ruling also leaves the sport vulnerable to the accusation that it is failing to enforce its own regulations if, as is possible, the supplements turn out not to be the source of the nandrolone. For the reality is that, 16 months after the first positive test, the ATP is still not certain of the source of the nandrolone.

Last year the ATP commissioned Richard Young, an anti-doping expert who helped draft the WADA code, to investigate the source of the nandrolone. But instead of providing a definitive answer, the Young report simply served to highlight the ATP's failures and the endemic use of supplements on tour.

Young's first task was to trace the supplements, which were so widely used that jars holding hundreds of pills were left in the locker-room at every ATP event. Also, he could find only one jar that had been used at a tournament where a positive test occurred. Some 500 pills from this were tested and all were negative for nandrolone.

He also discovered that the supplement distributor merely repackaged pills from another manufacturer. He was unable to establish from the original manufacturer, without recourse to civil law, whether it had ever manufactured products containing nandrolone, which could have led to contamination.

In light of yesterday's verdict, Young's conclusions will provide little comfort for the ATP's embattled CEO, Mark Miles. "In summary, while the circumstantial evidence points to nandrolone-related contamination of the electrolyte-replacement products as the source . . . there is insufficient evidence to prove that the electrolytes were the cause of the test results. Similarly, there is not sufficient evidence to prove they were not the cause."

The ATP yesterday announced it had hired two new investigators to determine the source of the nandrolone: Dr Peter Hemmersbach, a doping analyst from Norway, and Robert Ellicott, the former Australian solicitor-general.

WADA is reviewing Young's findings and the ATP's conclusions, and a final report is expected in two weeks. It is unlikely to be complimentary, given the assertion from the agency's head, Dick Pound, last week that the decision to accept the contamination argument was "odd".

WADA will restrict itself to the technicalities, but there is plenty more the ATP needs to do to restore its credibility, not least shortening the time taken for cases to be heard.

The UK Athletics panel which heard Dwain Chambers' drugs case a fortnight ago delivered its verdict in three working days, even though the case involved THG, a drug never before examined by a tribunal. The Rusedski verdict, which centred on the most tested drug in the medicine cabinet, took 31 days to be announced.

Guardian Service