Today we debut The Rally, a new feature that will hopefully continue every other Wednesday. It's a pretty simple concept: Freelance tennis writer and former Tennis.com editor Kamakshi Tandon and I will bat around a tennis topic of the moment. This week: you know who.
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Kamakshi,
Christophe Rochus hasn’t gone out quietly, which actually isn’t all that surprising. There was some talk at one point in the past about how the Rochus brothers—Christophe and Olivier—were considering going public with their suspicions that a certain player or players had pulled out of an important event to avoid having to take drug tests. Nothing came of it, but it does seem like Christophe has been stewing about this subject for a while. He says he was once warned by the ATP for bringing it up.
What do you make of his comments? He states that doping is rampant in tennis and basically an open secret, but doesn’t assert much more than that he’s suspicious of guys who can play for five hours one day and then come back “like a rabbit” the next. He says that yes, there are tests, but they can be evaded, and that one opponent of his came back from a bathroom break transformed, before ending up with a nosebleed. And then he responds to the frankly surprising question from the interviewer about rumors that their countrywoman Justine Henin’s 18-month retirement had really been a doping suspension in disguise. I hadn’t realized that this had gone from random, musing speculation to a full-fledged “rumor” (if there is a difference).
I’ll leave those last elements for later and start with Rochus’s more general comments. Do you think he’s totally out of line here, making statements any observer could make without offering evidence? Is that just an irresponsible way of hurting the sport? Or do you think the more attention that’s paid to doping in tennis the better? To me there’s some of both in this. Rochus is whining—and there’s the taste of a sour grape or two in that whine—but he does make a good point in saying that no matter how many times players are tested per year, it’s still possible to beat the system. A cyclist who recently came up positive admitted that he’d been tested something like 100 times when he’d been doped, but had passed every one of those tests anyway.
Tennis players are tested frequently, but any expert will tell you that the only ones that matter are the out of competition tests, and when you look at the ITF’s doping stats from 2009, you do see holes there. As of last year, there was no blood testing out of competition, which means HGH couldn’t be tested for; something like a quarter of the tests were missed (the records of them have been eliminated from the list on the ITF's site); a top player like Novak Djokovic wasn’t tested at all out of competition; and there were no EPO tests done until the French Open. Rochus isn’t the final word on anything, but it would be willfully naïve to think that tennis is by nature cleaner than any other sport.
Or should he have just kept his mouth shut?
Steve
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Steve,
Should Rochus have just kept his mouth shut and should we just ignore him? Exactly what I was asking myself on Saturday evening, trying to decide whether to spend part of it translating his comments (whee).
We've heard very similar things from other rank-and-file players a couple of times before, like Andrew Illie and Nicholas Escude. Once again, the comments are largely unsubstantiated. And as always, it's bound to create some over-the-top headlines about tennis being rife with doping.
At the same time, it does seem there's at least a small fringe of players who do hold this view, which is perhaps worth acknowledging in itself. And given that his comments seem pretty sincere and reflective (see the "noble cause" remark referenced below), it's not illegitimate for people to be interested in knowing what he said.
What always surprises me is that these players are in the best position to actually get evidence of their suspicions. Yet they never bring anything more incriminating to the table than some story about how they got beaten by some player who played five sets the day before.
Players should be free to say what they think, but need to hold themselves to a high standard of responsibility on topics like these.
Before we get all technical, I did linger on Rochus' philosophical remark that players who dope know they're taking risks with their health, but they're taking them so their families can be financially set for life. Their cause is "almost noble," he said.
The irony, of course, is that Rochus is sometimes tagged as a suspected match-fixer (scandalously, he once lost to a British journeyman on grass). Would he extend that thinking? And what does it tell us about the nature of these problems and how to combat them?
Touching quickly on the Henin issue, the reason there was a question specifically about her is because it was Belgian newspaper. He answered the question, by all appearances honestly. Personally, I think it's a wild idea -- unlike league sports that write their own rules, this is strictly forbidden for Olympic sports and what are the chances the ITF would risk their entire eligibility and reputation for one Justine Henin? The timing also doesn't add up.
Anyway, the real question in the room at times like these is always -- is there doping in tennis, and how much? Let's take a crack at that one.
Kamakshi
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Kamakshi,
Maybe the Belgian journalists heard more than I did about any Justine rumors. But even for a Belgian paper, it does seem like a leap to publish speculation about it. There are 50 rumors about various other players I could bring up right now, which would only prove that there lots of rumors. Is there a rumor going yet about why Dementieva decided to retire so suddenly?
One other element of Rochus’s comments that was interesting was the opponent who came out after a bathroom break transformed, and ended up with a nosebleed. Is Rochus saying the guy took an amphetamine or other pill to energize himself? There was a lot of talk about that kind of thing in the early 80s, especially in Short Circuit by Michael Mewshaw, and the bathroom break has become more common lately. They’re going to become a topic of conversation again now.
As far as the most important subject, steroids in tennis, I keep looking back at baseball, cycling, and track and field. In general, where there was smoke, the fire was eventually discovered—Marion Jones, Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Floyd Landis, likely Lance Armstrong. As with baseball 10 years ago, tennis players on both tours are more muscular than ever, and their endurance levels seem higher than ever. On the one hand, this doesn’t prove anything by itself. You could even say it was inevitable that once the game became a power-baseline war, it would take a different body type to slug from the backcourt for hours than it did to make quick serve and volley bursts. But, if you keep in mind the three sports I mentioned above, you’d be more likely to say that this evolution has been sped up because some tennis players have been taking steroids.
The one difference I hang onto between tennis and cycling is the culture of the sport. Landis said he knew that all the top guys in cycling doped, and he decided that if he wanted to compete with them, he had to join them. Too much of his life had been devoted to it to give it up. Bonds, according to reports, had largely the same attitude; he couldn’t stand seeing McGwire break home-run records when he was so obviously juiced. Unless tennis is also completely dirty like cycling, the psychology for top tennis players would be different. They wouldn’t be joining everyone else, they’d be robbing everyone else.
Pro athletes obviously will do anything when it comes to their performance; even, in the case of Roger Clemens, volunteer to lie to Congress. Do you think a tennis player would be deterred by anything?
Steve
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Steve,
Of course there's a rumor going around about why Dementieva retired; it's that she's pregnant. :)
The Justine question just sounds like a flyer: 'let's see what he says.' In a non-Belgian publication, it might well have been about another player. It's there, it's at the bottom, it got a non-answer—and that's about all the attention it deserves.
The way Rochus tells the nosebleed story, I keep imagining some sort of Popeye-spinach effect. But yes, he seems to be referring to some sort of suspected stimulant use, though I reserve judgment on the significance of the story given his limited description of what happened.
Let's be clear: it's possible to avoid the system and there's probably significant benefit to doing so. But any useful discussion on this topic has to start with some understanding of practical realities involved.
Let's broadly divide performance-enhancing drugs into three types:
- Stimulants—things that give you a temporary boost, from the cup of coffee you had this morning to the cocaine Player X snorted from his wristband. Only banned in-competition.
- Old-fashioned steroids—I mean the type that stay in your system and show up on drug tests for a long time after you've taken them, nandrolone being the classic example.
- The high-end methods—either undetectable or goes out of your system very quickly, so it's very hard, expensive and invasive to test effectively for it. Designer steroids, EPO, HGH, blood-doping, the spectre of genetic-engineering, etc.
I think there's enough testing at the tour level to keep 1. and 2. under control. There's a good chance of getting caught, and the punishments are pretty severe unless you come up with a really good story. (Apparently 'micro-dosing' is now the thing for steroids, but let's put that into Type 3.)
Type 3 is where we just don't know. Is it zero? No. This was always unlikely, and after the Wayne Odesnik bust for HGH, there's really no way to make that claim. But do a lot of players lie awake at night thinking their opponents aren't playing clean? No, I don't think so either.
And that's pretty much what I rely on. It may not seem like much, but in practice it's not a bad approach.
You're spot on that culture is the vital factor—once everyone's doing it, and no one cares anymore, it's very hard to root out. And it just doesn't seem like that's happened.
As we've seen in other sports, the players always know. And it's hard to keep things secret for long in a highly insular community like tennis. Based on current knowledge, I think it would be a shock to most people if the problem turned out to be systematic.
Everyday experience is a part of this. Most players seem to have only a vague understanding of doping and the rules in general—until Gasquet, for example, a lot seemed to think all positive tests are created equal. Few grasped the details of Agassi's story about testing positive for crystal meth, and how things would (and would not) be different under today's system. And there was a lot of confusion during the nandrolone crisis, which has since given a lot of fake fodder to the conspiracy theorists.
Unlike cyclists and the like, tennis players aren't part of sophisticated, well-funded teams, sleeping in high-altitude tents and training with scientific precision. They don't even get basics like nutrition and schedule planning right, and they're going to carry out some highly complex procedure to artificially enhance their performance? And what's more, those procedures often need medical personnel and equipment that can't be brought along on the road.
That still leaves room for a few exceptions, but at least it puts the focus where it should be: what can be done to plug the gaps?
Ultimately, what the debate and speculation speaks to is uncertainty. It's up to the policing system to give us better confidence. That's been very difficult for a number of reasons, but it's also the only thing we have control over.
Kamakshi