Sugar queen has left such a sour taste...
BACK in five minutes, said the slogan on Maria Sharapova’s shirt. That was on May 24. It turned out the authorities had other ideas. Back in two years, they told her yesterday. Not for the first time, it seems she was too cute for her own good.
Tennis used to hand out silent bans, like the time Marin Cilic disappeared from the circuit with what was said to be a knee injury — but Sharapova’s couldn’t be louder if it came with its own horn section.
By hijacking the news from the outset, she has made sure this is a very public fall from grace. Her reputation in shreds, her carefully buffed image tainted — if you don’t take sweets from a stranger, you certainly don’t take them from a drug cheat — there is speculation Sharapova’s career might be over.
Alert to another PR ambush — Sharapova initially seized the opportunity to announce she had failed a drugs test before anyone else could — the International Tennis Federation released details of her long attempts to dope and conceal that were exhaustive and shocking.
In doing so, they may also have taken down the claims that meldonium — a drug that features extensively across many of the recent failed tests by Russian athletes — has been falsely categorised. Indeed, so potent and immediate is its effect that Sharapova took higher doses for bigger matches against better opponents.
Her use is systematic and dates back more than a decade. From 2012, however, nobody but her father, and agent Max Eisenbud, vice-president of tennis at IMG, knew she was doping. The drug was not declared on any forms — some other medications were — and no notification was given to doctors or even Sharapova’s nutritionist.
Eisenbud has boasted that he and Sharapova are so close they email 75 times a day but the tribunal refers to a ‘lack of understanding and expertise’ on his part, notes ‘evident implausibility’ in his account, calls him ‘casual and inept’ and ultimately ‘rejects’ his evidence.
He claims he failed to review the 2016 banned substance list because he ‘separated from his wife and did not take his annual vacation in the Caribbean’. He is not the only member of the Sharapova camp playing an unconvincing victim.
POOR, sorry me has been Sharapova’s stance from the start and while it may have fooled her fans, behind the scenes hardnosed lawyers have been doing their damnedest to protect an asset whose income is measured in tens of millions each year.
This was among Sharapova’s claims: that a ban would disproportionately affect her, because of the significant loss in commercial earnings. The idea that it somehow made her different, or less worthy of sanction, than some obscure weightlifter, popping pills in a sweaty, anonymous gym is perhaps most contemptible of all.
The ITF were not fooled and, it is to be hoped, nor will the Court of Arbitration for Sport be when the inevitable appeal arrives. So much of Sharapova’s wrongdoing seems based on the arrogant assumption that she was above a reckoning. Yet far from being the victim, she fits the perfect drug cheat’s profile.
There is regular use, tailored to events, there is deception and, when the evidence spills out, there are multiple clues and inconsistencies that make her duplicity plain. Sharapova does not disclose meldonium on the anti-doping forms she completed during the 2016 Australian Open — where she failed her test — but she did check the paperwork carefully enough to tick a box stating her sample should not be used for research.
She claimed she did not think it was her ‘huge responsibility’ or of ‘high importance’ to disclose her medication, but the previous June she had asked the WTA whether a nasal spray for sinus issues was legal to take. And she wasn’t a light user, either. At last year’s Wimbledon she used meldonium — also known as mildronate — six times in seven days. At the Australian Open, it was five times in seven days.
The ITF’s conclusion was ruinous: ‘…a deliberate decision to keep secret from the anti-doping authorities … the manner of its use, on match days and when undertaking intensive training, is only consistent with an intention to boost energy levels … she took mildronate for the purpose of enhancing her performance … sole author of her downfall…’
There is nothing sweet about being the face of Russian drug cheats, in this of all years. Whatever saccharine her brand might offer, there is now nothing sweet about Sharapova at all.