“Nineteen months of my reputation, my livelihood, slowly trickling away,” Moore despaired. “Nineteen months of emotional distress. It’s going to take more than 19 months to rebuild, repair and recuperate from what we’ve been through.” It is this glaring disparity, between the burgeoning superstar who is allowed to keep everything quiet and the member of the rank-and-file who is fed to the wolves, that lies behind much of the simmering resentment among Sinner’s colleagues.

“This is not right,” said Britain’s Liam Broady. “Plenty of players go through the same thing and have to wait for months or years for their innocence to be declared. Not a good look.”

The broad headline is that Sinner has not sinned in any way. The portrayal by his lawyer is of a poor unfortunate ensnared by the merciless strictness of tennis’s anti-doping system. Quite whether his fellow players buy into this depiction is a moot point. Several would have loved for the details of a positive test to be suppressed until a no-fault ruling was established. So has Sinner, courtesy of his access to the best legal representation, been the recipient of preferential treatment? And how can the process be so opaque as to bury his test results but not those of his lowlier brethren? The longer these questions go unanswered, the more the game’s image suffers. “Different rules for different players,” raged Shapovalov.

It did little to soothe tensions that the ATP Tour promptly released a statement expressing sympathy for Sinner, pitying the “challenging situation” he had gone through. Not half as challenging, mind, as one endured by Moore, who cried on her Wimbledon return this summer about all the time she had lost trying to clear her name. The fact that Sinner has enjoyed a far less rocky path to the same outcome only sharpens an impression of tennis as the ultimate two-tier sport.