Sharapova out for two years over drug use
Well-deserved suspension casts cloud over career
Tennis player Maria Sharapova was given a two-year suspension Wednesday after she tested positive for the banned substance meldonium at the Australian Open in January. Her results from the open are disqualified, and she forfeits ranking points and $281,633 in prize money.
If this is it for 29-year-old Maria Sharapova, and it certainly could be, it’s such an inglorious ending. It’s also a well-deserved one. When one of the world’s iconic athletes willfully disregards repeated email warnings that a drug she has been taking for 10 years is being banned, and continues to use it after the ban, and hides the fact that she is taking it from her doctors, there’s only one word for that kind of behavior: cheating.
The International Tennis Federation suspended Sharapova for two years Wednesday for testing positive twice in 2016 for the banned substance meldonium. She immediately said she will appeal the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, hoping to lessen her suspension.
We’ll see how that goes, but either way, she will not be able to represent Russia at August’s Olympic Games in Rio and likely will miss the rest of the 2016 Grand Slam season as well. Her ban is retroactive to the 2016 Australian Open, where she first was caught using the drug, so she would be allowed to return after the 2018 Australian Open, when she will be approaching her 31st birthday.
Since her last Grand Slam victory came in the 2014 French Open, and since she hasn’t played since a quarterfinal loss to Serena Williams at the Australian Open, and since she has dropped to 26th in the world rankings, it’s entirely possible we have seen the last of Sharapova as an elite tennis player.
Meldonium is a drug used to treat angina and heart failure in real life but one that also has the wonderful side effect of increasing an athlete’s endurance. It was unknown to almost all of us outside of Russia until this spring. As we’ve learned more about it, it’s clear there are real questions about how long it stays in an athlete’s system. Could an athlete have taken it in 2015 when it wasn’t on the banned list and still tested positive in 2016 when it was?
This is a valid point, but it in no way pertains to Sharapova’s case. She admitted to taking the drug in 2016, using the utterly inexcusable defense that she hadn’t opened the emails all elite athletes routinely receive with updates about banned substances, including urgent and repeated warnings about meldonium in late 2015.
What’s more, the notion that she needed meldonium for legitimate health reasons is seriously in doubt. An independent threeperson ITF tribunal hearing her case determined that Sharapova went to great lengths to keep her meldonium use a secret. In 2013, she actually stopped seeing the doctor who prescribed it for her, then failed to tell her new doctors that she was still taking it.
Her story has been that she needed the drug to treat a magnesium deficiency, an irregular elec- trocardiograph and a family history of diabetes. If that was the case, why keep all that information from your doctors for three years?
As the ITF report damningly noted, “Whatever the position may have been in 2006, there was in 2016 no diagnosis and no therapeutic advice supporting the continuing use of (meldonium). If she had believed that there was a continuing medical need to use (meldonium) then she would have consulted a medical practitioner.
“The manner of its use, on match days and when undertaking intensive training, is only consistent with an intention to boost her energy levels. It may be that she genuinely believed that (meldonium) had some general beneficial effect on her health but the manner in which the medication was taken, its concealment from the anti-doping authorities, her failure to disclose it even to her own team and the lack of any medical justification must inevitably lead to the conclusion that she took (meldonium) for the purpose of enhancing her performance.”
Maria Sharapova, five-time Grand Slam champion. And now, sadly, world-class cheater.