Those of us with long tennis memories weren’t all that surprised to hear Yannick Noah sound off on the subject of drugs in tennis this year. He did the same thing three decades ago, when he scandalized the sport by claiming that he smoked pot, and that amphetamines were commonly used as performance enhancers on tour. Noah’s comments about a similar subject 30 years later were just as controversial, and just as impossible to prove.
In November, Noah rocked the sporting world by suggesting that Spanish athletes may have achieved their current dominant position through doping, because of a lack of enforcement on the part of Spanish authorities. Noah was widely pilloried for making a broad accusation with no evidence, but the former French Open champion, who says his country’s athletes now look like “dwarves” compared to the Spanish, stood his ground. He claimed that his remarks were meant to wake people up to the lax enforcement of certain countries’ doping agencies.
Noah was rightly criticized for making this kind of idle public speculation—it tars a lot of innocent people with the doping brush. Still, his comments were not completely out of left field. As Noah himself noted, Spain’s authorities cleared Tour de France winner Albert Contador of a drug charge against the recommendation of the World Anti-Doping Authority, a ruling that WADA is currently challenging in court. If Noah’s words eventually bring more scrutiny of the doping authorities in all countries, they will have served a purpose: Keeping someone else from making the same idle speculation in two, three, five, or 10 years.
—Steve Tignor
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