The blow to Bastián Malla’s career: he tested positive for marijuana

With 25 years and owner of a talented left hand, Bastien Malla trying to take off in the tennis circuit to finally ratify everything he showed in his youth. However, due to various situations, his career was not consolidated and, to make matters worse, in early April, he received a severe blow. This is a positive result for cannabis detected during a doping control carried out during the recent Santiago Challenger which was played between March 5 and March 13, so today he is provisionally suspended by the International Tennis Integrity Agency, who since January 1 of this year has been in charge of the sport’s anti-doping programme.

In this tournament, the first of the season, Antofagasta (517th in the ATP ranking) played two games quality , with a victory over Michel Vernier and a defeat against the Argentinian Facundo Juárez. After this last duel, the test that gave this unfavorable result was carried out. Then, the following week, he retired against Colombian Cristian Rodríguez in the first round of the Concepción Challenger rankings and since that date he has not played.

The situation of the former U14 world champion It is very similar to that experienced by weightlifter Arley Méndez on the eve of the Olympic Games last year. As marijuana today is considered a substance of abuse and not a method to achieve better performance, the World Anti-Doping Agency has amended its Code and sanctions. In reality, the sanction is now a three-month suspension for this type of positive , as long as the athlete manages to prove that the consumption took place outside the hours of competition. That is to say until 11:59 p.m. the day before his first match of the tournament.

Same, the sentence can be reduced to just one month if the athlete agrees to undergo a drug treatment program created and directed by the anti-doping body responsible for managing the results and recognized by the International Tennis Federation, as was the case of the Cuban, who managed to participate in the Tokyo event.

In the event that you are unable to prove that the ingestion was prior to the competition, the left-hander risks a maximum of two years in prison , which would practically doom his future in tennis. In this context, the northerner, according to comments made in his entourage, worked on his defense. For his part, contacted by this means, The athlete did not want to refer to the situation.

Malla’s case is the second doping case that shakes Chilean tennis, after the one in which he played Nicolás Jarry in 2020, when he tested positive for ligandrol and stanozonol, Substances that the athlete claims to have accidentally ingested due to cross contamination of a dietary supplement. For this reason, the ITF suspended him for 11 months and Nico had to start from scratch after the suspension because he lost all the points he had obtained up to that moment.

Bastián Malla stood out at youth level as one of the greatest talents of his generation, which also included Christian Garin. The two went the mainstays of the team that won the U14 world title in the Czech Republic in 2010 and positions Chile as a power.

In the junior circuit, the native of the Second Region He became number 56 on the planet and won important triumphs , thus the hopes of the medium were ciphered on their backs. That’s how he quickly started to stand out in the old Futures, in which he racked up 12 titles and won resounding triumphs like the one he won against the Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime (current 10th in the ATP ranking) or the Pole Hubert Hurkacz (14th). He became 362nd in the world in 2015. However, due to various reasons including bad decisions, he failed to make it on the challengers circuit. where his best results were the quarter-finals in Rio de Janeiro 2013 and Buenos Aires 2018.

After this tournament, he told El Deportivo in an interview that before he didn’t appreciate what he had and the exposure prevented him from playing as expected. “Everyone put a lot of pressure on me, like it happened to Christian (Garin). I think that was the year he matured and that affected me as well. It was something of fate, something that had to happen. Now I’m on the right track and I want to keep moving forward,” he said. However, what followed was no better.

A series of injuries, a lack of funding and other situations of a personal nature prevented Malla from achieving this long-awaited consolidation. Anyway, last year, a ray of hope was lit with good performances as he won three U15 tournaments (Cairo, Ulcinj and Antalya) and experienced an increase of more than a hundred places that allowed him to return to the group of the 500 best in the world, but this 2022 did not start in the best way and the doubts of the past began to reappear surface.

Until last weekend, he was registered with M25 in Ulcinj, Montenegro, the week of May 16 , hoping that his appeal for the penalty for doping will be favorable. However, he decided to delete himself. In any case and whatever the sanction you receive, in the world of tennis and in its environment there is concern about its future in sport where in recent times he has been very far from that genuine desire to enjoy the activity that once knew how to give him great joy in his youth, but that today he has confronted him with the harshness of a circuit very different from the one he had always dreamed of.