With 25 years and owner of a talented left hand, Bastian Malla try to take off in the tennis circuit to finally ratify everything he showed in his time as a youth. However, due to various situations, his career has not been consolidated and, to make matters worse, in early April he received a severe blow. This is a positive for cannabis detected in a doping control carried out during the recent Santiago Challengerwhich was played between March 5 and 13, so today it is provisionally suspended by the International Tennis Integrity Agency, that as of January 1 of this year is in charge of the anti-doping program of this sport.
In that tournament, the first of the season, the Antofagasta (517th in the ATP ranking) played two games of the qualy, with a victory over Michel Vernier and a loss against Argentine Facundo Juárez. After that last duel, the test that gave this adverse result was carried out. Then, the following week he retired against the Colombian Cristian Rodríguez in the first round of the Concepción Challenger classifications and since that date he has not played again.
The situation of the former U14 world champion It is very similar to the one 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 modified its Code and sanctions. In fact, the punishment is now a three-month suspension for this type of positive, as long as the athlete manages to prove that the consumption occurred outside the competition times. That is, until 11:59 p.m. the day before his first game in the competition.
Even, the sentence can be reduced to just one month if the athlete agrees to complete a substance abuse treatment programcreated and directed by the anti-doping organization in charge of results management and recognized by the International Tennis Federation, as was the case with the Cuban, who managed to participate in the Tokyo event.
In the event that you fail to prove that the ingestion was prior to the competition, the southpaw risks a maximum of two years of punishment, which would practically sentence his future in tennis. In this context, the northerner, according to comments in his environment, has been working on his defense. For his part, when 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 starred Nicolás Jarry in 2020, when he tested positive for ligandrol and stanozonol, Substances that the athlete claimed 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 suspensionbecause he lost all the points he had achieved up to that moment.
Bastián Malla stood out at the youth level as one of the greatest talents of his generation, which also included Christian Garin. Both went the mainstays of the team that won the U14 world title in 2010 in the Czech Republic and positioned Chile as a power.
In the junior circuit, the native of the Second Region He became number 56 on the planet and achieved important triumphs, so the hopes of the medium were encrypted on their backs. This is how he quickly began to stand out in the old Futures, in which he has accumulated 12 titles and achieved some resounding triumphs like the one he achieved against the Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime (current 10th in the ATP ranking) or the Polish Hubert Hurkacz (14th). He became 362 in the world in 2015. However, for various reasons, including bad decisions, he failed to establish himself on the challenger circuit.where his best results were the quarterfinals at Rio de Janeiro 2013 and Buenos Aires 2018.
After that tournament, he told El Deportivo in an interview that before he did not value what he had and that the exposure prevented him from performing as expected. “Everyone put a lot of pressure on me, as happened to Christian (Garin). I think that this was the year in which he matured and it also touched me. It was something of destiny, something that had to happen. Now I am well on track and wanting to continue advancing”, he declared. However, what came after was no better.
A series of injuries, lack of financing and other situations of a personal nature meant that Malla did not achieve that long-awaited consolidation. Anyway, last year a light of hope was lit with good performances as he won three M15 tournaments (Cairo, Ulcinj and Antalya) and had an increase of more than one 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 surface again.
Until last weekend, he was registered in the M25 of Ulcinj, Montenegro, the week of May 16, hoping that his appeal to doping punishment will be favourable. However, he decided to erase himself. In any case and beyond the sanction that he receives, in the world of tennis and in his environment there is concern about his future in the sportwhere lately he has been very far from that genuine desire to enjoy the activity that once knew how to give him a lot of joy as a youth, but that today he has him face to face with the harshness of a circuit very different from the one he always dreamed of.
