Sharapova ban ‘height of pettiness’
WILL SWANTON
Sport reporter
@SwantonOz
Maria Sharapova’s ban from the French Open is the height of pettiness. A capitulation to popular opinion. A refusal to use a wildcard for one of its intended purposes, to give the paying public what it wants.
There’s no Serena Williams at Roland Garros. No Sharapova. Probably no Eugenie Bouchard. Which means there’s a lot less charisma. Women’s tennis needs its divas.
Sharapova’s peers hate her. Plenty of officials dislike her. She wants very little to do with most of them. The players danced on her grave when she was suspended for doping last year after playing one tournament, the Australian Open, with a banned substance in her system. I was at The Indian Wells Masters in California the day she revealed her positive test to Meldonium. The best women’s players were wheeled out to comment. There was no real sense of doom and gloom. A bad and sad day for the sport, et cetera. There was glee that Sharapova was up to her neck in it. Kick her out!
It was personal, not professional. The fact she had used Meldonium for a decade cast her in a poor light. The probability of enhanced performance. But the other fact was this: she broke no rules in those years. Meldonium was not on the banned list until last year. One tournament was the scale of her offence. It wasn’t like she cheated anyone out of an Olympic gold medal. Not like she ripped off rivals in sevens Tours de France. There were no trophies to be handed back.
In her one tournament outside the rules, she lost in the quarter-finals. Sharapova’s ban ended in April. The famously ill feelings in the women’s locker room led to calls for her to be denied wildcard entries to tournaments. Make her qualify, they said. She received three wildcards and proved she deserved the lot of them, starting with her run to the semi-finals at Stuttgart.
That pissed off a whole lot of people: It was a little difficult to keep claiming she did not deserve to be there. She’s played strongly. Passionately. She’s bitten her tongue. But then French Open officials blew smoke in her face when it came to their own wildcard. They said they could not support a drug cheat. Well, that was one way to look at it. The narrow way. The vindictive way.
The other way would have been this: Sharapova is no longer a drug cheat.
Her return to Roland Garros would have been beau cinema. Grand theatre. The French federation might have had a point when they said the 30-year-old’s world ranking of 173 did not warrant a main-draw wildcard. OK. Fair enough, perhaps. But to banish her from the qualifying tournament was ridiculous. They should have given her the chance to prove her worth. Make her fight for it. That would have been the greatest cinema of all: one of the world’s richest and most successful athletes, one of the all-time women’s greats and one of only ten women to have completed the career grand slam, would have been compulsive viewing when she slogged her way through the completely unglamorous qualifying tournament. She wanted to do it.
She’s a past champion in Paris. And they knocked her back? Petty. The easiest thing to do is howl criticism at Sharapova. Mobs rule, and in this case, the mob has won. Her next tournament will be the Wimbledon tune-up at Birmingham. She has received a wildcard there.
But she is not demanding special treatment. Here’s the proof: Sharapova has decided against seeking a wildcard into the main draw at Wimbledon. Instead, she has elected to join the riffraff in the qualifying tournament at Roehampton. She’s willing to swallow her pride. She’s prepared to fight for her berth at The All England Club.
Might be difficult for the holier-than-thou mob to criticise that.
>