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Maria Sharapova Is Planning a New Game

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By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY MARCH 8, 2016

It is not as if tennis does not know how to march on without Maria Sharapova. She has missed extended periods of play because of major shoulder surgery and other ailments during the past nine years.

And before she revealed Monday in Los Angeles that she had tested positive for the recently banned drug meldonium, many in the sports world, including some of her own sponsors, were preparing retrospectives. They were convinced by her hastily called news conference and latest series of injuries that she was about to retire.

But there would be no nostalgia Monday, only surprise — shock, really — and a global cocktail of more conflicting reactions that ranged from disillusionment to schadenfreude to sympathy. Sharapova, ever a polarizer of opinion, is set to serve a provisional ban that begins Saturday, and her positive test, which she said she will not contest, is already shaking her successful business model to the core, with key sponsors like Nike and Porsche suspending their relationships.

This break from the game for Sharapova will be starkly different in tone from the many breaks that have preceded it.

It is possible that she will not play on tour again. She will turn 29 next month and has talked in the past about not competing past 30. Her ban could be as long as four years if she is found to have intentionally ingested a performance-enhancing substance.

The more likely outcome, according to legal experts consulted Tuesday, is that she will not be deemed guilty of intentionally trying to cheat, which would mean that she would be subject to a maximum suspension of two years.

“I think that is the most likely outcome from what I heard in the press conference,” said Paul Greene, an American sports lawyer and founder of Global Sports Advocates, who has represented athletes, including the American tennis player Robert Kendrick, in arbitration cases involving doping.

Sharapova, like some other veteran players, was already looking at 2016, which includes the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, as a potential endgame. A two-year ban would keep her out of the sport until early 2018, which might be too long to keep the internal flame alight, particularly in view of her recurring injuries.

But her legal team intends to argue for a much shorter suspension, and the feeling in the Sharapova camp Tuesday was that a ban of one year or less was achievable.

Greene said there was also the possibility of applying retroactively for a therapeutic-use exemption for meldonium, which would be based on Sharapova’s long-term medical usage. If approved, it could absolve her.

“That would be the first thing I would counsel her to do, is to apply for a retroactive T.U.E.,” he said. “It’s a tough standard to meet, a much harder standard than a forward-going T.U.E., but I’ve had a case in the past where that happened, and I’ve gotten retroactive T.U.E.s. that have wiped out adverse analytical findings. It’s not impossible.”

John Haggerty, Sharapova’s lawyer, was asked about that possibility. “Maria and I are looking at all our options,” he said. He also declined to comment, citing confidentiality, on whether Sharapova had listed meldonium, which is also known as mildronate, on her doping control form when she had given samples in the past.

The nature of Sharapova’s long-term usage should be critical to her case. If she can prove it was for legitimate medical purposes, the case for leniency is stronger. There is also the fact that she has plenty of company in 2016, with athletes across a range of sports — from figure skating and speed skating to track and weight lifting — testing positive this year for meldonium, whose use was reportedly widespread before the ban, particularly in Russia.

Two experts said the rash of positive tests could actually help Sharapova because it might suggest that not enough had been done to communicate the rule change.

It also could soften public outrage. Her sponsors are nervous. But a member of her team expressed a measure of relief, explaining that all her major sponsors have contract clauses that would allow them to terminate those deals in the current circumstances. For now, the key sponsors have only suspended the relationship, which could still mean a significant cost savings with Sharapova unable to meet minimum-play requirements built into the contracts if she is suspended for an extended time.

The normal adjudication procedure calls for Sharapova to face a three-member tribunal, whose members are appointed by the International Tennis Federation. Haggerty said no date had been fixed for that hearing or the official meeting that would precede it. Sharapova or the I.T.F. would then have the right to appeal any ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The two most prominent tennis players in recent years to be suspended for doping violations — Viktor Troicki and Marin Cilic — each had their suspensions reduced in 2013 on appeal to the C.A.S., Troicki from 18 months to 12 months and Cilic from nine months to four months.

The Cilic ruling, according to Greene, established a precedent for judging degrees of fault, although future arbitration panels are not bound to that standard.

“There are three degrees of fault: a significant degree of fault, which is 16 to 24 months; a normal degree of fault, which is eight to 16 months; and a light degree of fault, which is zero to eight months,” Greene said.

Sharapova is not contesting her positive test. She has admitted taking meldonium, a drug developed for heart patients that increases blood flow and was put on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned list on Jan. 1. Sharapova has said she was unaware that the drug had been banned, although it had been on WADA’s monitoring list in 2015. She has taken full responsibility for being unaware of that development.

She said she failed to follow through on a Dec. 22 email by clicking on a link to WADA’s updated banned list for 2016. But the Times of London reported on Tuesday that four other communications were sent to tennis players in December, all containing warnings that meldonium was about to be banned.

Sharapova’s management team responded with a statement: “Whether it was one notice of some kind or more than one, Maria has already acknowledged she should have known. She makes no excuses for missing it.”

Sharapova said she had been taking the drug, which Haggerty said she knew under the name of mildronate, since 2006 to treat a variety of medical conditions, including irregular EKG results and indicators of diabetes, a condition for which she said she had a family history.

Haggerty rejected suggestions from some prominent doctors that the drug was poorly suited to resolve Sharapova’s declared conditions, including diabetes, and said the drug also provided “cell protection.”

Haggerty said the confidentiality requirements of the coming hearing precluded him from identifying the doctor who prescribed the medicine, which is not approved for sale in the United States but is widely available without a prescription in Russia and some other European nations. Haggerty also indicated that it was only one of several drugs Sharapova was prescribed at the time.

“I think there’s a misunderstanding that Maria took mildronate and only mildronate, and that was to address all of her medical conditions,” Haggerty said. “She took mildronate and a number of other medicines.”

Whatever she took, it has been a nasty start to 2016 for tennis, which began with the sport announcing an independent review of its anticorruption program in the midst of the Australian Open because of reports raising concerns about match fixing, largely in the men’s game.

Now one of the biggest stars in women’s tennis is facing questions about her integrity. The answers will determine whether we’ve seen — and heard — the last of her at the highest level.

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