Sport must face up to ineptitudes in wake of Maria Sharapova case

Expect to hear a lot more about 3-(2,2,2-trimethylhydrazinium) propionate dihydrate in the coming days, weeks and months. Like a warped version of the Christmas standard, by Tuesday we were up to potentially nine Ethiopian distance runners, six Georgian wrestlers, two Ukrainian biathletes, two Russian speed skaters and a multimillionaire five-times grand slam tennis champion who had tested positive for the Latvian-manufactured heart drug more commonly known as meldonium.

It was instructive to watch the reaction play out in real time on social media as Maria Sharapova stood to make her carefully crafted admission in that packed room in a downtown Los Angeles hotel with an awful carpet, loaded with reporters who were expecting news of her retirement.

From within the sport, the obligatory defence mechanism. The head of the Women's Tennis Association, Steve Simon, immediately praised her integrity and leadership skills and Martina Navratilova said she was sure it was all an honest mistake that could soon be smoothed over. Serena Williams said her rival had shown "courage" and "heart".

From outside the sport, the inevitable questions. As many have pointed out, it beggars belief that Sharapova and her huge entourage – all the machinery and accoutrements of modern sport from IMG to Nike, and her own medical and support staff – could have missed the fact that a drug she had been taking for a decade had been made illegal.

Not only had it been on Wada’s “watch list” for the whole of 2015 but anti-doping insiders say that the level of communication over changes to the list is far more comprehensive than the email link that Sharapova claimed she failed to click on.

Before every tournament, tennis players are invited – but not obliged – to list all medication they are taking, whether or not it is banned. Did Sharapova list meldonium, a drug that is not licensed in the US or the UK? If not, why not? And if she did, which seems unlikely, surely somebody would have spotted the fact she was taking a drug that was on the watch list and would soon be banned?

But the broader question is this: where’s the line? It’s blurred, it’s always shifting and it looks very different depending on where you stand as an athlete, as a coach, as an administrator, as a fan. Where’s the line between blood-spinning and blood transfusions? Where’s the line between legitimate use of thyroid hormone to treat a condition and illegitimate use to enhance performance? Then there are the number of distance runners with asthma who take medication that has performance-enhancing effects. Tramadol, the heavy-duty painkiller, is under similar scrutiny in the cycling world. The very words Therapeutic Use Exemption understandably cause an involuntary raising of the eyebrows.

Read through Alberto Salazar's carefully argued rebuttal of the myriad allegations against him and his Nike-funded Project Oregon athletes and you'll find him walking a similar tightrope – determined to do anything that will gain the slightest edge but determined, he says, to stay within the law. We will know soon enough, with United States Anti-Doping Agency set to deliver its report into Salazar within days. How to judge Novak Djokovic and his gluten-free diet or the cocktail of nutritional supplements consumed by the bucket load by rugby players?

The only way to judge them is by the rules set down by Wada, the body with the power to set sanctions. Yet that simple yardstick begs further lines of inquiry.

In a world where we celebrate legally acquired “marginal gains” in high-performance sport but rightly damn those who fall foul of anti-doping rules that fall the other side of the line, Sharapova’s dramatic mea culpa raises some pretty tough questions, not only for the Russian tennis player but also for sport more generally. Was Sharapova’s potential crime to use a substance for which she had no medical use to improve her recovery times and increase aerobic capacity? Or was it to fail to pay more attention when Wada caught up and eventually banned it? “It’s a borderline ethical discussion – if an athlete could be taking it without a medical reason there are questions around the ethics of whether an athlete should be taking it in this way,” said UK Anti-Doping’s head of science and medicine, Nick Wojek, on Tuesday. He is right, it is an ethical discussion. But when margins are so fine and the mantra of most within high-performance sport is to do anything within the rules to gain even an infinitesimal advantage, we should not be surprised when athletes, coaches, their support systems and whole countries continually test the limits.

Vitaly Mutko, the Russian sports minister, who famously claimed expenses for 97 breakfasts in 20 days at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, said dismissively on Tuesda that meldonium “does not do anything major, just helped a lot of people with their recovery times”. In modern sport, recovery times are everything. It’s worth thinking about the sporting world that governing bodies, sponsors and broadcasters have given birth to.

Relentless, high-octane, year-round sports place ludicrous demands on star athletes. It is a system that by its nature demands ever more superhuman levels of performance. That’s true of football, of tennis, of rugby, of athletics and of most other major sports.

For good measure, the Russian Tennis Federation’s president, Shamil Tarpischev, confidently predicted that Sharapova will play at an Olympics where the participation of her track and field counterparts remains up in the air. “I think this is just a load of nonsense. The sportsmen take what they are given by the physiotherapists and by the doctors,” he said, like Mutko casually hitting the nail on the head without meaning to.

There are questions here for Wada too, even as it faces up to the huge issues posed by Dick Pound’s report that revealed systemic doping in Russia and in any sane world should still be the trigger to look at other countries and other sports. Should it be quicker to identify substances that confer a performance advantage? Is a once-a-year audit enough? Does the entire testing and investigatory regime need re-imagining from the bottom up? Is the amount of money invested in the never-ending race to stay in touch with the cheats anywhere near enough? And can we logically expect individual sports and whole countries to go as far as they should in chasing down their own?

In rightly asking the tough questions of Sharapova and the scores of other athletes likely to be busted for a hitherto little-known drug used to treat ischaemia in the coming weeks, and of those who have already moved on to exploit the next substance that lives in the grey area between what is banned and what is ethical, we might also have to ask some tough questions of ourselves.

(Guardian service)