Somani's Four-Year Ban: The Question Isn't Trimetazidine, It's Who Carries the Burden of Proof

The International Tennis Integrity Agency's announcement landed last Wednesday, and a new line went into the notebook I keep in the right-hand corner of my desk. I have kept that ledger since 2026 — South Asian tennis, rankings, scores, prize money. For years the only number beside Parikshit Somani's name was a single figure: a career-best doubles ranking of 256.

Wednesday's announcement put a second number next to it. Four years. The suspension runs to September 2029. He will be roughly thirty when it ends.

Reading the release, my eye stopped not on the length of the ban but on the tribunal's language. Trimetazidine — a heart medication banned at all times under class S4 of the WADA Prohibited List since 2026. The independent tribunal called his argument "scientifically implausible, highly speculative and unconvincing".

That wording told me the real story of this case has nothing to do with the substance. It is about burden of proof — and about who can afford to carry it.

The structure first. Somani is twenty-six, Indian, with a career-best doubles ranking of 256. A sample taken at a lower-tier event in Astana, Kazakhstan, last year returned trimetazidine. His only defence was that a family member's medication had contaminated his food. An August hearing rejected it; on Wednesday the ITIA confirmed a four-year suspension.

For comparison, the agency reached for Kamila Valieva's name — same substance, same four-year outcome. Sun Yang's 2026 trimetazidine case sits nearby. The parallel is one of defence strategy, not of facts, and I will come back to that distinction.

The body that issued the ruling runs tennis's anti-doping and anti-corruption programme on behalf of the ITF, ATP, WTA and the Grand Slams. Its instrument is the WADA Code, and the Code has a hard edge. Once a prohibited substance appears in a sample, the burden of proving the source lands on the athlete. "It may have come from food" is not enough. You have to prove it: which meal, whose prescription, which pharmacy, which date.

That is where my first objection sits. Proof is a legal concept, but assembling proof is a line item in a budget. Building a contamination defence takes laboratory testing, batch verification of a medicine, sometimes a pharmacokinetic study, and at minimum a lawyer who knows the sport's rules. Top stars absorb that as a small entry in a team budget. At world No. 256, there is no team.

So what kind of profession is doubles tennis at No. 256? Prize money at ITF and Challenger level is thin enough that once travel, coaching, lodging and stringing are counted, many players outside the top 100 finish the year at break-even, and a good number finish at a net loss. Sponsorship at this tier is not a clothing deal; it is a parent's bank statement. A nutritionist, supplement testing, a doctor's advice — at this level these are luxuries, and that is the trap.

Where there is no professional nutritionist, the kitchen becomes the only layer of doping control — and a kitchen has no laboratory protocol. When a family member's medication and a player's plate share the same table, the risk stays invisible, because the person you would need to see the risk is a person the family cannot afford to employ.

This is where my old notebook earns its keep. In 2026 I walked into the women's final at the National Tennis Complex in Dhaka with the only notebook in the stands — zero accredited press, and all 78 points recorded in my own hand. That evening made something obvious: a sport nobody keeps records of is a sport whose problems nobody names. Anti-doping is the last layer of that. A teenage girl here has nobody to ask about a medicine's name — not at the federation, not at the club.

I am used to chasing money with a notebook. This case is the exception — there is no prize money in it, only cost. And an athlete who wants to fight a sanction must first carry exactly the expense he could never carry in his career.

Look at the numbers once more. Twenty-six to thirty is where a tennis player's best combination of body and experience forms. A four-year ban shuts that window entirely. Ranking points cannot be protected during a suspension, and the protected-ranking mechanism built for injury lay-offs is generally unavailable for doping bans. The route back therefore starts from zero — qualifiers, ITF, Challengers, first-round money again.

The scope deserves separate attention. The ban stops more than play; it also blocks coaching and even attendance at ITF, ATP, WTA, Grand Slam or national federation events. The sanction does not close one door; it closes both.

The larger signal, though, sits elsewhere. What matters is how tribunals are reading trimetazidine food-contamination defences. From Valieva to Somani, the language is similarly severe. That shows the defence corridor narrowing, and the evidentiary bar rising for anyone who tries it next.

Bangladesh may seem irrelevant here. It is not. What our federation lost across three decades after the 1970s was not only courts or coaches; it was the capacity to build institutions. A federation that struggles to collect junior entry fees will not build anti-doping education, supplement screening or legal support. Zarif Abrar's 2026 ITF J30 junior title is small by world standards and historic by ours — exactly as the Somani case is small in world tennis and a warning for us.

Now flip it. The headline sounds severe, but the practical loss may be smaller than it appears. A doubles player ranked 256 at twenty-six was already outside realistic main-tour breakthrough range. What the ban took from him is less in ranking points than in the road to a life after playing. And there lies the mismatch: the scale of punishment is global, while the structure of support is local — and at the base tier that structure is close to zero.

The Valieva reference also needs unpacking. The similarity is in the defence — food contamination, inadvertent ingestion — not in the facts. In Somani's case the Valieva card plants a familiar face in a reader's mind, which is an old journalistic technique: making an obscure event recognisable by attaching a known name. It works, and it can also mislead if readers assume the two cases are the same.

One more thing is visible. This case surfaced the base of the anti-doping pyramid, not the top. At Challenger and ITF level monitoring density is lower, as is out-of-competition testing. Where testing is scarce, detections are scarce — but when someone is caught, that person absorbs all the attention. That asymmetry in the data leads us to the wrong conclusions.

Next time a nineteen-year-old from Chattogram or Kerala tests positive and says, "my father's medicine may have been in the food", who pays for the defence? If the answer is nobody, then a four-year ban is not a deterrent — it is a filter that catches only those who could not afford to prove otherwise. And that arithmetic has to be fixed before the next case arrives, not after the announcement.