Beyond the Field. Dear WADA, please enhance your performance

On March 6, Maria Sharapova’s agent announced that the tennis star would hold a press conference the following day to make what he termed a “major announcement.” Reports abounded of a possible retirement. After all, Sharapova had competed only sporadically over the last several months, and she hadn’t played a single match this year since losing to Serena Williams in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open. This was Sharapova’s 18th consecutive loss to Williams. It was possible that she had, by now, had enough.

Having won five major titles and amassed more than $35 million in prize money alone (to say nothing about her off-court earnings), and with Williams proving insurmountable, perhaps Sharapova believed there was little left for her to prove.

The next day though, when she took to a microphone assembled in a dingy Los Angeles hotel, with a clumsily folded sheet of paper in hand, Sharapova moved quickly to dispel rumours of her retirement. “I know many of you thought that I would be retiring today,” she said in commencing her conference. But “if I was going to announce my retirement, it would probably not be in a downtown Los Angeles hotel with this fairly ugly carpet.” But what followed this quip — the major announcement, as it were — was altogether more shocking, a completely unanticipated revelation that has jolted the world of tennis into virtual suspension. “I wanted to let you know that a few days ago, I received a letter from the [International Tennis Federation] that I had failed a drug test at the Australian Open,” she said. “I did fail the test, and I take full responsibility for it.”

Until lately, tennis had been relatively unaffected by doping scandals. Even as other sports were mired with many top athletes testing positive for banned substances, very few of the best tennis players had faced such ignominy. In recent times though, with the frequency of testing increasing, more prominent players have faced sanctions. Marin Cilic, who would later win the US Open, was banned for nine months (which was reduced to four) for testing positive for nikethamide, while the Serbian Viktor Troicki was given an 18-month ban (reduced to 12 months) for simply missing a drug test. But neither of these players is quite in the league of Sharapova. And what’s more, in Sharapova’s case, unlike theirs, the infraction appears to be far more egregious.

The drug in question here, Meldonium, which is manufactured in Latvia, and is unapproved by the American Food and Drug Administration, was added to the list of banned substances by the World Anti Doping Agency [WADA] only from the beginning of 2016. Sharapova claims she’s been on Meldonium for nearly 10 years, for medical reasons, and was unaware of the decision to ban the substance. According to her, she missed reading an email from WADA in December last year that explicated the list of banned substances, a list that now included Meldonium. But this supposed ignorance might not quite mitigate the damage done.

After all, WADA had been specifically monitoring Meldonium for over a year, after finding traces of it in blood samples obtained from several athletes. According to one study, some 2.2 per cent athletes in the world had Meldonium in their system. These reports pointed to its powers of boosting body metabolism in a player, of helping improve an athlete’s endurance and aerobic capabilities. For a sport like tennis, in which success is predicated today on supreme bodily condition, the performance-enhancing quality in Meldonium was rather clear. Sharapova’s explanation that she was consuming the substance to treat a medical condition may or may not have been true. Indeed, until last year, within the pure letter of the doping law, if not under far broader ethical norms, she had all rights to take the drug. Athletes often tend to do everything within their powers to compete, to improve their physical and mental conditions. But Sharapova’s explanation is almost blasé; every time a major athlete fails a drugs test, the reasons are the same: either an ignorance of having consumed the substance or an ignorance of the law.

In some quarters, therefore, the questions remain the same, and the answers either black or white. Is Sharapova’s blunder an innocent one, or has she, like so many other superstars before her, committed a grave moral sin? “It’s not up to me to decide the punishment, but if you’re taking performance-enhancing drugs and you fail a drugs test, you have to get suspended,” British tennis star Andy Murray said, in response to Sharapova’s admission. “I think taking a prescription drug that you don’t necessarily need, but just because it’s legal, that’s wrong, clearly. That’s wrong. If you’re taking a prescription drug and you’re not using it for what that drug was meant for, then you don’t need it, so you’re just using it for the performance-enhancing benefits that drug is giving you. And I don’t think that that’s right.”

But there are also larger ethical issues at stake here. That those who violate WADA’s proscriptions ought to face sanctions is unquestionable. Tennis players — especially those at the top — often maintain a large coterie of advisors. It’s within the scope of their jobs to know what goes into their bodies. But sport also tends to encourage and virtually reward players who do everything they can to secure even the most negligible of gains, while remaining within the realms of the law. Novak Djokovic is famous for undertaking a gluten-free diet, and for sitting inside a “CVAC Pod” — an egg-shaped chamber that helps saturate a player’s blood with oxygen. It might be unfair to question Djokovic for using these measures when there is nothing illegal about them. But that Sharapova was using a drug for more than 10 years before it was finally found to be performance enhancing tells us much about the regime that sport operates under, an administration that is, time and again, left in the slipstream by those trying to find an advantage.

Suhrith Parthasarathy is a Chennai-based lawyer and writer; @suhrith

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