'The aim is to gather data from as many players as possible so we have the widest set of data to work from,' the ITIA said in a statement. 'Logistically it makes sense therefore to arrange this in advance once or twice a year, so we can test as many players as we can.
'Because we do this ABP testing on an ongoing basis - both with notice and no-notice - it does not make any difference if players know about it in advance. Adverse levels will show, either with this test or through in-competition or out of competition testing.'
However, Rob Parisotto, an Australian stem-cell scientist who pioneered the first test for EPO and was a member of cycling's expert ABP panel, says that the tennis authorities are potentially allowing cheats to escape detection by warning them they will have to provide a sample.
'The ITIA's statement is a remarkably egregious one,' Parisotto said. 'It does make a huge difference if testing is known in advance with regards to blood doping. A three- to four-day window before a tournament would be the ideal period to "top up" your blood volume to maximise oxygen-carrying capacity and therefore improve endurance and recovery capabilities.'
During the US Anti-Doping Agency's investigation into systematic doping by Armstrong, the cyclist's US Postal team-mates admitted they regularly manipulated their blood parameters using saline infusions when they knew they would be drug tested.
The ITF has also been accused of inflating its testing figures after it emerged that they count every sample taken during an individual doping control as a separate test. If a player submits blood, urine and blood-passport samples at the same time, it is counted as three tests rather than one.
The ITF's own official documents list these figures under 'tests per player', and not 'samples per player'. The testing data which The Mail on Sunday obtained for one Russian player, for example, who has been ranked in the top 20, shows that they were tested three times out of competition 2015. The ITF's official figures state they underwent at least seven.
In 2021, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic were tested nine, 12 and 13 times out of competition respectively, according to ITF statistics.
Former WADA president Dick Pound described the way the ITF collate their figures as 'misleading'. He said: 'I have always been suspicious of the federations that rely on the number of tests administered as opposed to targeting the highest risk players. They seek refuge in the statistics, saying, "Oh, we tested 1,000 players".'
Random out-of-competition doping tests increase the chances of catching competitors who choose to dope. In 2021, the ITF warned players that they would be tested for 16 per cent of all ABP tests. The agency says advanced notice of ABP testing presents players 'with a further challenge around how they deal with the prospect of a test in a few days'.
The ITIA states that for all regular urine and blood testing, samples were collected with no advance notice.
The ITF has never sanctioned a player for abnormalities in their ABP nor for an EPO positive. At most, two in-competition ABP tests were performed at grand slams in 2021, effectively meaning the organisation did not use its ABP to gauge whether players were blood doping at the sport's most important tournaments. It did, however, test directly for EPO.
The ITF's fight against doping has often been under scrutiny over the past 20 years. In 2016, Federer revealed that he had been tested only once in 10 years during offseason warm weather training in Dubai.
Similarly, in testing data obtained by this newspaper, eight Russian players, who were given special approval to compete at the 2016 Olympics despite their country's state-run doping programme, were not tested at all in the 2014 and 2015 off-seasons.