Australian Open quarter-finals

Serena Williams v Sharapova
Radwanska v Suarez Navarro
Azarenka v Kerber
Konta v Zhang

I may be cynical but would we have heard about this at all if Sharapova hadn't held a press conference to announce she's failed a drug test. We only found out that Marin Cilic failed a test when the news was leaked to the Croatian media and an umpire banned for gambling violations worked at the US Open last year. Makes me wonder about the extended absences that some players have had.

In an ITF tourney last week in the burgeoning metropolis that is Pelham, Alabama, one-time-next-big-thing Taylor Townsend won a qualifier in a double bagel. Her opponent, Gail Falkenberg, is 69 years old. This is not a misprint or a late April Fool's joke. There's an annual USTA U.S. Open National Playoffs event where any Josephina Shmoe can play, and she won a match last year, which gave her 12 ranking points, placing her at #329 in the USTA open ranking system. That allows her to enter ITF qualies.
This is laughable, but it renews the sadness I feel that Daniela has to be connected in any way, shape or form to ITF events.

Maria Sharapova, Who Was On So Many Pills, Banned Two Years For PED Use

An independent tribunal just handed tennis star Maria Sharapova a two-year ban from the sport for testing positive for meldonium, a substance that Sharapova has been taking for a decade but wasn’t added to the WADA’s list of banned substances until last year.

Sharapova’s defense was that she was prescribed meldonium in 2005 for legitimate health reasons, and only went on taking it after it was put on the banned substances list because she didn’t pay close enough attention to the updated list. The tribunal didn’t buy that argument, determining that Sharapova went out of her way to keep her meldonium intake secret—she stopped seeing the doctor who prescribed it to her in 2013, and failed to tell her newer doctors that she was still taking the drug—and only used it because of the physical advantages it offered. From the report:

But from 2013 onwards Dr. Skalny was no longer her doctor. She has no excuse for failing to disclose her use of Mildronate or to seek advice from a specialist doctor as to whether its continued use in competition was permissible. The tribunal finds it hard to credit that no medical practitioner whom she consulted over a period of 3 years, with the exception of Dr. Yasnitsky, would, in accordance with standard medical practice, have asked her what medications she was taking. In any event Ms Sharapova should have disclosed that she was regularly using Mildronate in case there was a possibility of adversely affecting another treatment prescribed.

That leaves the issue as to why Ms Sharapova was systematically using Mildronate before matches, and in particular at the Australian Open in 2016. In the tribunal’s view the answer is clear. Whatever the position may have been in 2006, there was in 2016 no diagnosis and no therapeutic advice supporting the continuing use of Mildronate. If she had believed that there was a continuing medical need to use Mildronate 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 Mildronate 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 Mildronate for the purpose of enhancing her performance.



Even more interesting than the tribunal’s conclusion, however, is the look this report gives us at the incredibly shady shit that goes down with Russian athletes. Sharapova first visited the doctor who put her on meldonium in 2005, when she was just 18 years old, and he prescribed her 18 medications and supplements that were meant to develop “the optimal individual plan of medical and physiological monitoring and targeted correction of functional reserves, and its implementation in the practice of the athlete’s preparation and maintain the proper functional regime.”

Sharapova continued to receive care from this doctor up until 2013, and by that time his list of recommended medications and supplements had grown from 18 to 30. Sharapova eventually cut the doctor loose, in part because she was overwhelmed by all of the pills she had to take, but she continued taking three substances that he had recommended, including meldonium.

Tribunal verdict shreds Maria Sharapova defence

By 2010 the list of drugs Sharapova was taking – none of them on the banned list until meldonium was added on 1 January 2016 – had swollen to an extraordinary 30 that alongside Mildronate also included magnerot and riboxin. In 2013, Sharapova parted ways with Dr Skalny but decided to carry on taking those three substances. “That decision to continue to use those three substances from Dr Skalny’s list of 30 was taken without the benefit of any medical advice, either from Dr Skalny or from any other medical practitioner,” it said.

“So Ms Sharapova did not seek any advice about the therapeutic need to continue using Mildronate, nor the possible side-effects of doing so. She did not know the ingredients of Mildronate and had not read the manufacturers’ instructions for use.”

While the rest of her team knew about other vitamins and medications she was taking, responsibility for ensuring those three drugs were not on the banned list fell to Eisenbud. Which is where an excuse to rival Richard Gasquet’s “cocaine kiss” and Denis Mitchell’s bedroom prowess in the list of tall tales advanced in doping cases down the years comes in. Eisenbud claimed that while in previous years he had printed off the banned list and taken it to the Caribbean to consider by the pool, in 2015 he had not taken his annual vacation because he had split up with his wife. Hence, he argued, he never checked whether meldonium had been added – as it had in light of growing concerns that it was being taken for performance-enhancing reasons by huge swathes of athletes.

“His evidence did not explain why with that lack of understanding and expertise he was prepared to accept the important responsibility of checking whether Mildronate was prohibited, why he did not delegate this task to his assistant who could easily have made the necessary enquiries, or why it was necessary to take a file to the Caribbean to read by the pool when one email could have provided the answer,” it ruled. “The absence of any documents or records evidencing Mr Eisenbud’s system speaks for itself. Critically he does not explain why the three substances inherited from Dr Skalny’s regime were treated so differently from all the other medications and supplements which were vetted by the player’s medical team, not by him, and recorded in emails and medical records.”

Did Kerber really win two Grand Slams? It means Grand Slams are important, I know.