SHE’S BACK
Tennis in turmoil as Maria returns
SOME time next Wednesday Maria Sharapova will enter the women’s locker room for the first time since the Australian Open a year last January. The reception is unlikely to be warm, although that will not bother her a jot. She has never put any store on being popular among her peers.
The atmosphere could be especially frigid, as many of the others at the Stuttgart Grand Prix are decidedly nonplussed by her gatecrashing the event halfway through, while still being banned.
Not only that, but two of the game’s most respected players were yesterday given an ill-tempered volley by the Russian’s American agent.
Max Eisenbud — the man who famously admitted he used to check the banned substances list while sitting by the pool on holiday in the Caribbean — is not impressed by Caroline Wozniacki and Agnieszka Radwanska’s criticisms of his client getting wild cards.
In a statement to American tennis writer Ben Rothenberg he said: ‘All those journeyman players like Radwanska and Wozniacki who have never won a Slam and the next generation passing them. They are smart to try and keep Maria out of Paris. NO Serena, NO Maria, NO Vika [ Azarenka], NO Petra, it’s their last chance to win a Slam.
‘ But they have never read the CAS report and they never read paragraph 100 and 101. So they have no clue.’
Sharapova’s re-entry to the frosty orbit of the locker room has to be on Wednesday. That is because her suspension for the doping violation in Melbourne does not expire until then, and she is banned from even setting foot on site.
She and the tournament are taking advantage of the WTA rulebook, which does not expressly forbid or permit a banned player from participating in a tournament that begins before a suspension ends.
Sharapova was handed one of the kinder draws when she was paired with Italian veteran Roberta Vinci, whom she has played twice before and lost only four games.
Another win would open up the fascinating prospect of a grudge second round against Radwanska.
There is no question that her return will be a desperately-needed boost to the WTA Tour. It was at a low ebb even before Serena Williams announced her pregnancy. So many top players have fallen by the wayside that six out of the last nine Grand Slam champions are not currently active on the tour, for an array of reasons.
Tournaments and sponsors are crying out for what Sharapova can bring. Stuttgart is backed by Porsche, one of the blue chip companies that has stayed loyal to the Russian, and the event has been overwhelmed by hundreds of media requests.
Sharapova’s ban has been an inglorious episode, not just for the player but the whole sport. Some of its constituents have given the impression of a doping ban being an irritating inconvenience, rather than something of the utmost seriousness.
Since issuing her public mea culpa on March 7 last year the former world No1 has portrayed herself as someone who made an innocent mistake.
There is a pattern emerging here, also seen recently in cases involving Team Sky and Mo Farah. The fastidious business of making marginal gains suddenly melts away into a mysterious haphazardness
Journeyman players who have never won a Slam want to keep Maria out, it’s their last chance Max Eisenbud, Sharapova’s agent, referring to Radwanska and Wozniacki
when it comes to recording which substances are entering athletes’ bodies.
There has been no lack of planning, however, i n Sharapova’s comeback PR strategy, Eisenbud’s revealing outburst apart.
It appears to have been one of granting soft-focus interviews to some media, while at the same time haranguing others who have been more questioning about her narrative of events.
A refresher: she was given a twoyear suspension by an independent International Tennis Federation tribunal last June, which she later appealed against at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. They reduced the ban to 15 months.
Sharapova has made much of the CAS judgement, referred to by Eisenbud, which declared that she was not ‘an intentional doper’.
Both tribunals accepted her assertion that, if she had known that the Mildronate was outlawed by the World Anti-Doping Agency at the start of 2016 she would not have taken it in Australia. In fact, anyone taking a banned substance like this, detectable by a simple urine sample, during a Grand Slam would have to be incredibly stupid and reckless, which she is clearly not. Everybody in tennis knows that the Majors take extensive anti-doping measures.
What remains troubling, and the source of so many unanswered questions, is what led to the positive test in Melbourne.
Many of the circumstances behind this were revealed in the original, broader ITF tribunal ruling.
At times she has either tried to airbrush this from history, or suggested it was biased against her and not ‘neutral’ like CAS.
Heading the independent ITF tribunal was Charles Flint QC, whose sometimes l acerating analysis ended with the conclusion that she was ‘the sole author of her own misfortune’.
Flint works out of Blackstone Chambers which, for the uninitiated, is widely regarded as the gold standard of lawyer partnerships in London, the city to which the world flocks for the impartial resolution of disputes. Adam Lewis QC, who is currently putting together the report into tennis match fixing, is from the same set of chambers.
His colleague Flint is a hugely experienced operator in the world of sports mediation, and among the disciplinary panels he has chaired were the hearings into the track and field cases of Dwain Chambers in 2004 and Christine Ohuruogu in 2006.
He and the two experts alongside him took a deeply sceptical view of Sharapova’s consumption of Mildronate/meldonium, which she said was to prevent an array of ailments identified after winning Wimbledon in 2004.
The benefits of taking Meldonium — not approved for use in the USA, where Sharapova lives — have been well- documented, including how it was consumed by Soviet soldiers in the Afghan war to aid stamina and concentration. Its use by hundreds of athletes
from Eastern Europe was what drew it to WADA’s attention. Sharapova insisted that it was to ease concerns about the functioning of, among other things, her heart. As Andy Murray noted wryly last year, it is odd how so many elite athletes seem to have heart trouble.
Sharapova was originally told to take two pills one hour before matches and for matches of ‘special importance’ the dosage should be upped to three or four pills. At Wimbledon in 2015 she took it for six days out of seven.
She kept this secret from her highly professional support staff and, from 2013, all the medics she dealt with aside from a doctor belonging to that bastion of sporting integrity — the Russian Olympic team. She did not mention it on f orms provided f or her, and employed the unqualified Eisenbud, her business manager, to monitor anti-doping developments.
‘The facts are only consistent with a deliberate decision to keep secret from anti-doping authorities the fact that she was using Mildronate in competition,’ the ITF tribunal noted. It states the view that she was using it to improve her performance. Another reference says: ‘Her concealment from the antidoping authorities and her team of the fact that she was regularly using Mildronate in competition for performance enhancement was a very serious breach of her duty to comply with the rules.’
Sharapova was always going to refer to CAS, with its history of leniency towards tennis players. But while Sharapova trumpeted the reduction of her ban to 15 months as some sort of vindication, it is worth noting that her legal team wanted it truncated to eight months. Her application for costs was also refused.
Stuttgart is the first of three wildcard appearances — the others will be at the Madrid and Italian Opens —with debate raging about whether doping cheats should be allowed a leg-up on their return.
Wimbledon are said to be inclined against giving her a privileged entry, but if she gets off to a flying start it is possible that she will earn her way in.