Excavating the Wild-Card Debate

As the red clay dust settles on Roland Garros’s decision to deny Maria Sharapova a wild-card, the controversy shows no sign of calming until Sharapova has scraped together enough points to earn main entry into future slams. Even then, people will likely deny the legitimacy of points gained through wild-card entries. With the flurry of articles dissecting the case, picking apart the corpus of evidence, this article is more of an excavation—digging backwards to expose more influences. In history and philosophy, a genealogical approach is one that works backwards from a single point, to uncover the expanding network of influences that came together. To thoroughly consider the Sharapova case is to ponder the purpose of punishment, the meaning of bio-medical norms, and to consider such phenomena as culture bound syndromes.

Any sport exists entirely as rules. From the lines and scoring to the code of conduct, tennis, in essence, is only set of mutually agreed upon rules through which players battle. When a player breaks a cardinal rule, it is a trespass against the core of what that sport ought to be. When a sport scandal occurs, French Philosopher Roland Barthes wrote that “the players’ combat ceases to be subject to the distance without which there can be no human society; once again a game becomes a conflict. Then sport returns to the immediate world of passions and aggressions, dragging with it the crowd, which came precisely to see purification from it. Sport is the entire trajectory separating a combat from a riot.” Without rules, we see tennis abstracted: two people hitting yellow felt at each other as hard as they can as millions watch. Holding players accountable to the rules is to maintain the sport’s legibility and integrity. When the news is filled with investigations of Russian influence in the White House, a Russian player doping tears away any pretense of the purity of sport, and reminds us it is just another proxy battle for what we seek refuge from.

When Sharapova was found in violation of a doping rule, she was found in violation of tennis. With a lackluster record on ethics, the ITF sought to establish the rule of law. Despite acknowledging Sharapova’s violation was unintentional, the tribunal appointed by the ITF sentenced Sharapova to a two-year ban and loss of the points she won at the 2016 Australian Open. While she had sporadically been taking Meldonium for a decade, the only violation was taking it after January 1, 2016. By all official accounts, her continued use was an oversight by Sharapova and her team. Had agent Max Eisenbud read the memorandum mentioning the addition of Meldonium, it stands to reason she would have discontinued use in a timely manner. In this context, Eugenie Bouchard calling Sharapova a “cheater” is hyperbolic at best, defamatory at worst. A cheater, by definition has intent to deceive and deprive others by trickery and violating rules. Anticipating the allegations, the CAS decision explicitly states that the case they heard was “not about an athlete who cheated” but rather assessed the extent of her fault and negligence in allowing a banned substance to enter her system. To dig further into allegations that Sharapova is a cheater means to look at why she used Meldonium and confront the sport’s concentration of power in Western hands.

When claiming that Sharapova is a cheater, even though neither the ITF or CAS rulings suggest as much, people typically cite how long she had been using Meldonium and how vague her explanation for using it seemed. Notably, Meldonium is on Russia’s Vital and Essential Drug list and is casually and frequently consumed by millions across Eastern Europe. The way Americans might casually take an ibuprofen for discomfort, Russians might casually take Meldonium. Outside of a Western context, taking it indicates nothing more than a person’s attempt to reach their baseline health. When adding drugs to the banned substance list, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) considers a drug’s ability to enhance performance. WADA has to draw an arbitrary line between performance enhancing and enabling. Therapeutic use exemptions allow players to use medications they need to reach a baseline for them to compete. To draw this line between enhancement and enabling requires there be an imagined norm at which individual bodies have the rightful claim to function. Because elite athletes’ bodies function at a much higher baseline than any actual norms, the process of drawing that line has to be somewhat arbitrary, which is where the sport’s governing bodies’ concentration of power cannot be separated from the debate.

Designating which supplements are permissible then takes into account what ailments reasonably require treatments. When Sharapova publicly explained her use of Meldonium, she cited such conditions as flu-like symptoms, a family history of diabetes, and mineral deficiencies. In the court documents, she specifically cited “vegetative-vascular dystonia,” a condition characterized by limited oxygen supply to the tissues and organs. The condition is what medical anthropologists refer to as a culture-bound syndrome. A CBS is a psychological or somatic condition that is only understood in its given cultural context. For example, when Americans have a headache, they are quick to blame their sinuses. Germans lack a common vernacular to describe a sinus headache but are quick to blame their “Kreislauf,” the circulation of blood through the body. While physically the symptoms could be identical, cultural confirmation bias will inevitably shape the experience, understanding, study, and treatments of common illness. Vegetative-vascular dystonia is a common and sensible explanation for ill health in Russia and it has been substantiated by Russian medical institutions. In a Russian context, repeatedly taking Meldonium over the course of years is common, even if it is not comprehensible to Americans or the French.

While people like to imagine that the hard sciences are subjective, research grants and priorities are informed by cultural bias. When WADA draws a line in the sand determining the reasonable baseline to be maintained, the officials’ own backgrounds will inevitably inform their concept of health. Beyond that, the actual performance enhancing qualities of Meldonium by any measure have only been substantiated by deeply flawed research studies. WADA did list the manufacturer’s own claims as evidence, but without the clear benchmarks, any advertising words are hardly a reasonable legal argument. Surely there are ways in which Gatorade and Clif bars enhance performance, highlighting again the arbitrary nature of the line between enabling and enhancing. When critics in France, the US, Switzerland, and England call Sharapova a cheater and cite the casual long term use of Meldonium alongside only a vague description of what it might treat as evidence, they are limited by a specifically Western Euro-American framework.

Beyond the question of whether or not she is a cheater, the debate around allocating wild-cards has repeatedly centered around if granting them is a reward and denial is a punishment.

Despite some hyperbolic comments saying she should not be rewarded for doping, it does not appear people are actually suggesting tournaments are doing that; if anything, they reward her for many accomplishments before the positive test and ignore the positive test. To say they are rewarding her for doping, it follows, means to question the legitimacy of her record going into the ban. While she may have taken Meldonium during many of her successes, which include winning a career slam, it would be murky ethical territory for tournaments to hold that against her when allocating wild-cards. While critics claimed she tried to hide her use before the ban, suggesting she knew it was bad in some way, the CAS decision specifically states there is no reason to believe she masked her use. A reward, strictly, is something given in recognition of a person’s achievements. In the terms of the wild-card debate, the guiding question with regard to reward then should be if the degree of fault she had warrants making her climb her way back to the top from the very bottom. According to the rules of tennis, she was perfectly justified in taking Meldonium as a way to maximize her ability to play. To say Sharapova should be not be recognized for her past accomplishments is to suggest a player not take a legal medication that helps them and possibly reject state of the art technology others may not be taking advantage of, like Djokovic’s Cyclic Variations in Adaptive Condition machine.

Sharapova’s supporters have described denying wild-cards as a form of further punishment. Over the course of the 15-month ban, Sharapova slowly saw her computer ranking points slip away until she lost her ranking after 12 months. The principle of proportionality was critical to Sharapova’s defense and it failed before the ITF tribunal and was not taken into account by CAS. Because of her high status, it was argued, she had significantly more to lose through a lengthy ban. For example, take fellow Meldonium user Varvara Lepchenko who turned pro the same year as Sharapova and has played about as many professional matches. In her career, Lepchenko has made $3.8M to Sharapova’s $36.6M. Losing a year of tournament play could easily cost Sharapova ten times as much in lost income, to say nothing of endorsements. However, the rules explicitly state that loss of income or timing of the sporting calendar will not be relevant to deliberations. Implicitly, that means losing the entirety of her ranking points was part of her punishment. It follows, tournaments not extending her wild-cards is not actually extending the punishment, but rather her having to start over is itself part of the punishment.

Digging backward from the current debate throwing around words like “cheater,” “reward,” and “punishment” does not actually solve a problem like Maria Sharapova, but it does provide the tools to better understand the complexity of the wild-card debate. Reflecting on the case, there is no reason to say she cheated. Still, to grant her a wild-card based on her previous accomplishments, to help her get back on her feet, does use the logic of her defense’s principle of proportionality, which was rejected by the ITF and CAS.

By consuming a banned substance, Sharapova inadvertently broke an important rule in a setting entirely premised on rules. To protect the sport’s legitimacy, the ITF was forced to act, but the lack of intent and even proof of gain continues to plague tennis as a reminder that some of the cardinal rules are largely based on subjective and arbitrary classifications. With major advances in epigenetics and gene doping developing faster than WADA can respond, Sharapova’s case leaves the tennis community without resolution and stands to remind us that the next major scandal is always just around the corner and could take anyone down with it.