Ignorance is a lax defence for dopers who draw crowds
According to her agents, Maria Sharapova did not serve a 15-month suspension from tennis for taking a banned substance. They will, as Marina Hyde of The Guardian so rightly pointed out, say it was that “type of year”. Well, a little more than a year.
Sharapova, they say, has been incredible in how she dealt with the stress of being banned. Sharapova, they say, is a woman of integrity. Sharapova, they say, has dealt with the “situation” honourably.
What they don’t say is that Sharapova took a banned substance and she took it for a long time. So it was left to the president of the French Tennis Federation, Bernard Giudicelli, to say it another way by denying her a wildcard to the French Open.
“There can be a wildcard for the return from injuries; there cannot be a wildcard for the return from doping. I’m very sorry for Maria, very sorry for her fans. They might be very disappointed, she might be very disappointed, but it’s my responsibility, my mission, to protect the high standards of the game played without any doubt on the result.”
According to Kevin Mitchell of The Guardian, Giudicelli has been “described as a ‘very clever egoist’ .... Was he French tennis’s answer to Emmanuel Macron? Was this the man to drain a swamp? Perhaps he will turn out to be just that.”
Steve Simon, the CE of the Women’s Tennis Association, doesn’t think the swamp needs to be drained of Sharapova. He knows his sport needs stars, and with Serena Williams out of the game, Sharapova is the star they need: “What I do not agree with is the basis put forward by the [French federation] for their decision with respect to Maria Sharapova. She has complied with the sanction imposed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
“The tennis antidoping programme is a uniform effort .... There are no grounds for any member of the TADP [Tennis Anti-Doping Programme] to penalise any player beyond the sanctions set forth in the final decisions resolving these matters.”
Tennis has only recently taken doping seriously. Four years ago, Andy Murray, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal called for more testing to be done.
Federer said it would be “naïve” to think tennis was clean. A Daily Beast report discovered tennis conducted 2,185 tests in 2012. Just 63 of those were out-ofcompetition blood tests.
Novak Djokovic, Federer and Murray had just seven in-competition tests and three out-of-competition each in the same year.
In 2011, Williams had none and that year, she locked herself in the panic room of her home when cameras showed there was an intruder outside. She called the police. The intruder was a drug tester.
At the end of April, two days after Sharapova ended her ban, the International Tennis Federation said it would increase the number of tests it would carry out on professionals by more than 60%, from 4,899 performed in 2016 to about 8,000 in 2017. It would also store more samples for future testing and double the antidoping budget to $4.5m.
Sharapova’s excuse, which was accepted by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, was: “I didn’t even know what meldonium was. I had to Google it to find out. For me, it was Mildronate.”
You could not get more naïve. Sharapova is a professional athlete who makes a lot of money — $300m of it according to guesstimates.
She makes some of her money from tennis, the rest by being Sharapova: “Beauty sells. I have to realise that’s a part of why people want me. I’m not going to make myself ugly.”
That is why she will receive a wildcard to Wimbledon and the grass court matches in the build-up to that Slam. Sharapova is a drawcard. Her millions of fans care less that she took drugs. They will see it as the “situation” and “that type of year”.
It was not a year. It was 15 months. And it was for taking drugs. Her return will not and should not be easy.