Two days ago I wrote about the mystery of Ana Ivanovic, and why a Grand Slam champion can’t do something as fundamental as toss a tennis ball and hit it. But that’s hardly a mystery at all compared to the one that, whether we care to think about it or not, has enveloped tennis and all other professional sports for years. Steroids, just when they’ve begun to slip our minds, keep coming back to haunt us. They may haunt the sportswriter most of all. How do the baseball scribes who wrote about Roger Clemens’s big Texas heart and Mark McGwire’s folk-hero smile, or the Olympic writers who waxed about Marion Jones’s tenacity and grace feel about those observations now? Are there tennis players that I've praised for their toughness and coolness under pressure, who I'll someday learn were just really good at taking drugs? It’s a depressing proposition, but after what’s happened in baseball, cycling, swimming, and track and field, among others, you’d have to be in a state of willful denial to think that it can’t happen in tennis.
There have been three drug-related developments in the news recently that apply to tennis. First there was Andre Agassi’s admission that he used crystal meth for recreational purposes in the '90s, failed a drug test, and got off without punishment after concocting an excuse that was only slightly stronger than saying, "Uh, I didn't do it." Next came the news that a British rugby player, Terry Newton, had become the first athlete to fail a blood test for HGH. This was proof, at last, that the test worked—Newton admitted to using the drug and has been suspended for two years—and has spurred baseball commissioner Bud Selig to push that sport’s player’s union to allow blood testing.
Tennis, which doesn’t have a particularly united player’s union, and which signed onto the more rigorous Olympic testing system a few years ago, already has blood testing. You can see just how much, or, depending on your attitude about these things, how little blood testing it has in this document. It’s a list of the ITF’s “2009 Tennis Anti-Doping Statistics,” and it runs down who was tested where and in what manner last season.
What does this list tell us? Are there holes in the testing system? Does it lead you to believe that tennis has a steroid problem? The site where I first clicked onto it certainly does: It’s called tennishasasteroidproblem.com. Both that blog—which is highly speculative but disturbingly compelling for pro-athlete skeptics and conspiracy junkies alike—as well as tennis writer Charlie Bricker, in a piece for Ubitennis, point to the number of out of competition tests, 47, that came back with no result at all. On the ITF list, these are indicated by three zeros—no urine, no blood, no EPO. The now-famous “whereabouts” rule requires that each player give the testing authorities a place where they can be found for one hour each day. According to the ITF, not all of these cases were whereabouts violations—the tester didn't arrive during the 60-minute window—and some were later deleted from the document.
The highlights, from a big-name perspective, of those missed 2009 tests are: Roger Federer (October 28); Rafael Nadal (June 14); Maria Sharapova (July 9); Juan Martin del Potro (Aug. 26); Venus and Serena Williams (June 16); Jelena Jankovic (Sept. 22); David Ferrer (Sept. 22); Caroline Wozniacki (Nov. 23). Gilles Simon missed two of them.
This isn't damning information, from a player perspective. Federer and Nadal, for example, were present for out of competition tests on May 18th and 19th, respectively. And there were dozens of lesser names and unknowns—Florence Gravellier, Julien Benneteau, Liezel Huber, Daniel Nestor—who were no-shows as well. Obviously, tracking the pros down away from events is more difficult than it is at a tournament, where they can be led off the court and straight to an on-site testing area.
Other points of interest in the document that you may or may not already know:
—Blood and EPO testing were only done at the Grand Slams. No out of competition blood tests were listed, but most of the top players received at least one blood test at a major. For example, Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Roddick, Verdasco, Safina, Dementieva, and both of the Williams sisters got one in Australia.
—There were no EPO tests given at all until Verdasco took one at Roland Garros. He was followed there by Azarenka and Kuznetsova. Wimbledon appears to be the epicenter of EPO testing; there were 12 given there, compared to only two, to Serena Williams and Ekaterina Makarova, at the U.S. Open.
—Nadal, for some reason, was tested twice during the Davis Cup final weekend.
You can make what you will of all of these facts, depending on how much faith you have in (a) professional athletes, and (b) your particular favorite player. Skeptics will say that knowing you’re only going to receive a blood or EPO test at a Slam, and knowing generally when you’ll receive a urine test, allows too much time for players to use PEDs, enjoy the positive effects in their play and in their training, and get them out of their system in time. Optimists will say that regular testing, along with the threat of unannounced tests, should keep any sane athlete from taking the risk. Skeptics may then counter with the classic and unassailable retort, “Marion Jones never failed a drug test.” There’s really no arguing that point, except to say that, if you take that line of pessimism to its logical conclusion, we might as well not do any testing at all. Bigger cynics will say, citing Agassi, that a star’s positive test will just be covered up anyway. I’d like to think that the WADA program, instituted in the years since Agassi’s meth-head days, would make that less likely.
The argument can go deeper. One observer might look at the bodies of today’s players, compare them to the wiry frames of the pros of 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, and draw comparisons to the McGwire and Bonds era of baseball, when player’s arms, legs, chests, even their heads increased in size. Why, this person might ask, did Ivan Lendl, who was devoted to fitness training, remain so rail thin?
But another observer could answer that pro sports evolve in all ways, including physically. That the advent of bigger racquets led to an emphasis on power, which required stronger and faster players, some of whom—Clijsters, Nadal, Monfils—have inherited pro-athlete genes, and others of whom happen to be 6-foot-6. Just because Boris Becker outweighed John McEnroe by 40 pounds, and Guillermo Vilas could run all day and had meat-hooks for arms, doesn’t mean these guys were juiced. Just because Grand Slam champions are getting taller doesn’t mean they’ve been taking tall pills since they were in their cribs.
In the past, I’ve wondered whether the whereabouts rule was too invasive, but those triple zeros on the testing list are haunting, and they’ve convinced me otherwise. I talked to Dr. Gary Wadler, a testing expert who has worked with various professional sports, including tennis, on their doping systems. Not surprisingly, he said that testing is useless without the out-of-competition element, and that out-of-competition tests are impossible without whereabouts rules that have some teeth.
As a tennis writer, to praise or even assess any player’s toughness or coolness under pressure, I have to presume that they’re innocent until proven guilty, that they're not just really good at taking drugs. All I can do is ask for the most effective testing possible. And if it doesn’t work, if the skeptics and conspiracy theorists are proven right in the future, I can listen to them say: I told you so.