Early on during his stay in the California desert a year ago, Giacomo Naldi allegedly reached into his treatment bag one morning and accidentally brushed his left finger across the blade of a scalpel used to remove calluses, immediately drawing blood. Two days later, after Naldi had removed the bandage from his finger, his colleague Umberto Ferrara suggested he use the over-the-counter ointment Trofodermin to treat his healing wound.
Naldi and Ferrara were in Indian Wells as Jannik Sinner’s physio and fitness trainer respectively. According to Sinner and his team, as Naldi began to use the ointment to treat his wound while also conducting his daily treatment on Sinner without gloves and Sinner undertook two doping tests in the subsequent two weeks, these events put into motion the most high-profile anti-doping case in tennis history as he twice tested positive.
