Mina Hodzic has received the same sanction as Sinner, for allegedly training with Jordi Marsé-Vidri

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Jordi Marsé-Vidri has come forward with strong criticism regarding the three-month suspension of tennis player Mina Hodzi

Mina Hodzic has received the same sanction as Sinner, for allegedly training with Jordi Marsé-VidriOn 6 March, world number 432 tennis player Mina Hodzic joined the group of sanctioned players for the season. Like Jannik Sinner, who returns to the field at the Rome Masters 1000 after testing positive for clostebol at Indian Wells 2024, the 22-year-old has also been fined one thousand dollars and suspended for three months without playing.

However, Hodzic's punishment was not for doping, but for allegedly training with Jordi Marsé-Vidri, the coach suspended for 15 years for being linked to Operation Bitures. Mina Hodzic has been charged by the ITIA (International Tennis Integrity Agency) for holding a preparatory session with Marsé-Vidri in October 2024 on the Cornellà courts. Action that is prohibited according to an article of the agency that makes it impossible to associate with a coach. The tennis player will be able to pick up a racket again on 6 June and is expected to be present at the WTA 125 in Valencia, which will be played from 9 to 15 of that month.

In an interview for MARCA, Jordi Marsé-Vidri has denied this accusation and has expressed what he thinks about the measure taken by the ITIA. "It is the biggest injustice I have ever experienced in my life and I am not only referring to the sporting level. It is an unprecedented suspension, unprecedented and with a touch of cruelty," said the Catalan, who claims that he did not train with the sanctioned player, but that it was simply a simple rallied.

"She was practising her serves. I was there picking up my racket. I saw Mina and asked her how she was. She had lost the doubles and it was like she didn't want to. I picked up four balls, threw them to her and we started playing, but I would never call that coaching. She took photos with her mobile phone, something you never do in an official session. Football training is not the same as kicking a ball", Marsé-Vidri explained.

The Catalan coach denounces that this is a ‘third-hand report, without direct or reliable witnesses’. According to Marsé-Vidri, the report was made by Iván Martínez Barredo, who is the only person authorised to do so, by order of Inés Ferrer Suárez, the tournament director, but none of them were witnesses to the events. ‘I spoke to her (Inés Ferrer Suárez), because she wasn't there either, and she told me that she had found out through an employee of the club that I don't know.’

An act that the coach describes as "very worrying. We are talking about a suspension for the simple fact of playing tennis, not for doping or corruption. This leads me to join Novak Djokovic's PTPA, which has denounced the systematic abuses that have been perpetuated for decades by the federations and the ITIA," says Jordi Marsé-Vidri for MARCA.

The Catalan is already working with his lawyer, Marcos García Montes: ‘I will continue to fight for the freedom of free training to be a right of the players, not a crime,’ he concludes in the interview.