Maria Sharapova will return to the WTA Tour this week in Stuttgart, Germany, after a 15-month suspension for meldonium use, triggered by inattention to anti-doping rules. She is unranked and will compete thanks to a wild-card entry granted by tournament organizers and scheduling that enables her to play a first-round match Wednesday, hours after her ban expires.
A longstanding tour rule enables past Grand Slam and WTA Finals champions to request unlimited wild cards. Sharapova will play the clay-court events in Madrid and Rome under the same auspices. An announcement from Roland Garros -- which Sharapova won in 2012 to complete her career Grand Slam, and again in 2014 -- is expected in mid-May.
These tickets to the chocolate factory have provoked heated discussion. Andy Murray, a consistent advocate of tougher testing in tennis in recent years, takes the blanket view that players emerging from doping suspensions should have to earn their way back into a main draw. Agnieszka Radwanska said Sharapova "should rebuild her career a different way, beginning with smaller events." Caroline Wozniacki called the wild card "disrespectful." Sharapova's first-round opponent in Stuttgart, Italy's Roberta Vinci, said she had no personal beef with the Russian but thought she should return "without any help." Others, including ESPN analyst and Hall of Famer Chris Evert, say Sharapova has served her time.
The fact that Sharapova is not being welcomed back with a shower of rose petals has as much to do with who she is as what she did. Uninterested in locker-room popularity contests, an island unto herself on the tour since she became a teenaged star and commercial juggernaut, Sharapova, who turned 30 last week, hasn't cultivated the friendships that might have helped insulate her from criticism.
Serbia's Viktor Troicki refused a blood test at a tournament and blamed his violation on misleading advice from an on-site anti-doping official. His fellow countryman Novak Djokovic castigated the system's failures rather than the player's, and there was relatively little stir when Troicki was offered wild cards to tournaments in Switzerland and China.
Marin Cilic of Croatia was suspended after a positive test for a stimulant banned in competition, a drug he said he ingested inadvertently in glucose pills. Cilic slid to No. 47 during his forced layoff, but still was eligible for the main draw at the BNP Paribas Masters event in Paris later the same season. He was cordially received.
"Only thing that I can say is I am happy to see Marin back on tour," Rafael Nadal said then. "He's a good guy and a great player. I don't know what happened, but if he's back, it's because it's fair that he's back." Jo-Wilfried Tsonga weighed in with this: "Personally, I just don't know who I have to believe anymore ... Those who are testing us I feel are not always saying the truth."
There just aren't a lot of tennis re-entries to compare with Sharapova's. As my colleague Mike Fish reported for Outside the Lines last year, the sport historically has been less than ardent about anti-doping measures and only recently stepped up its efforts. The number of big-name players caught for any banned substance of significance is miniscule.
Sharapova's suspension falls into the significant category because of her stature, not the drug found in her urine sample. Sloppiness, rather than a concerted scheme to cheat, was her downfall. The circumstances of her return make for great headline fodder, but given the flaws exposed in the global anti-doping process over the past few years, it feels like a distraction from some deeper issues.
Meldonium was added to the World Anti-Doping Agency's banned list as of Jan. 1, 2016. At the time of Sharapova's surprise press conference two months later, only a handful of positives had become public. By the end of 2016, according to WADA, 514 athletes had tested positive. There were 12 in 2017 as of last week.
Manufactured in Latvia and promoted as a heart-health protector that can aid exercise capacity, meldonium is not available or approved for use in the United States or much of Europe. Evidence of its actual performance-enhancing effects is thin. It was placed on the banned list largely because of data on prevalence. An increasing number of athletes were using it. Most of them were from Russia, then as now under intense scrutiny, and Eastern Europe.
Dozens of meldonium cases considered by national anti-doping organizations or international federations resulted in no-fault rulings or provisional suspensions being reversed, due to WADA's lack of prior knowledge about how long the drug lingers in the body. Studies were launched only after meldonium was banned, when some athletes said they had stopped taking it before Jan. 1, but still tested positive. WADA issued two successive sets of new guidelines that absolved many of them. Confusion and inconsistency in applying the standards will haunt the system for a while. Just last week, the Court of Arbitration for Sport nullified a yearlong meldonium ban already served by a biathlete from Ukraine.
Sharapova admitted taking meldonium after the cut-off date, and the level in her sample would have triggered a doping case even if she had not. The particulars of her circumstances were exhaustively explored in two separate rulings.
The ITF tribunal that first heard the case appeared to hold Sharapova to a higher standard because of her success. In one passage, the arbitrators snarked about her agent Max Eisenbud's habit of taking the prohibited list on his annual Caribbean vacation to review revisions. (Note to future panels: Tennis business conducted poolside is the definition of unremarkable.)
Sharapova's pattern of taking meldonium on big match days -- as a Russian doctor instructed her to do at age 18 -- was cited as evidence of her intent to use it for performance enhancement. The ruling closed with this verbal flourish: "[Sharapova] is the sole author of her own misfortune."
CAS arbitrators interpreted things differently, softening Sharapova's degree of fault, suggesting there could be improvements in the way players are informed of changes to the banned list, and reducing Sharapova's suspension from two years to 15 months.
Lost amid all the verbiage is the way a young athlete's health was managed: with a regimen of 18 permissible "medications and supplements," which are not listed in the ruling. That list ballooned to 30 substances by 2010. According to testimony recounted in the ITF ruling, Sharapova rebelled against the pill overkill in 2012, dumped the doctor and hired a nutritionist, but decided on her own to keep taking meldonium.
A kitchen-sink approach to medicating athletes certainly isn't limited to one country or one game. The practice is rampant in professional sports everywhere: wherever immune systems take a pounding, or chronic pain is a given, or schedules and travel compress recovery time, or all of the above. It can breed psychological and physical dependency and blur the boundaries between doctors and coaches.
The current anti-doping system has an ever-expanding prohibited list and legal reach. Objective guidance can be hard to come by for athletes trying to navigate the line between health and performance. How much pharmacy is too much? What are athletes being told is necessary to compete at the elite level? What are the real risks and implications? Those questions seem more weighty and worth examining than wild-card criteria.