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PARISPOVAGATE By Richard Evans

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Written by: Staff on 20th May 2017

Guy Forget, the tournament director of the French Open refuted any suggestions that the decision to deny Maria Sharapova a wild card into either the main draw or the qualifying event for this year’s Championships had anything to do with an Olympic bid.

“Obviously, this was a very tough decision but it was not influenced by the Olympic bid,” said Forget. “To some extent all these kinds of decisions are political and this one was very complicated. But in the end it was the decision of our new President Bernard Giudicelli and, although we all discussed it amongst ourselves, he didn’t even tell us before announcing his decision.”

Fair enough. Having known Forget for decades, I believe him. But if one wants to disconnect Sharapova from the Paris Olympic bid, the timing was unfortunate. The 11 man IoC committee, led by Patrick Baumann, was actually in Paris when the Sharapova announcement was made. Was Giudicelli really going to announce that he was giving a wild card to someone caught up in a doping issue and then insist that he was right behind the city’s commitment to a totally clean bid? That would have been tricky.

Earlier Tony Estanguet, the Olympic canoeing Gold medallist who heads the attempt to bring the Olympics back to Paris for the first time since 1924, had been emphasizing the need for Paris to present a bid free of any scandal or innuendo. “When I was competing I wasn’t thinking of anyone doping or not respecting the rules,” Estanguet had said.

There is little doubt that Giudicelli agonized over his decision. He had made a point of meeting with Sharapova at Indian Wells in March and admitted that refusing her a wild card was “sad”. But to say that the Olympic bid did not enter his thinking stretches credibility.

When I asked some people who know Giudicelli and respect his commitment to giving the French Federation a fresh impetus, they answered “100%” when I suggested that L’Affaire Sharapova had been affected by the presence of the Olympic committee.

All of which leaves the two time French Open Champion as something of a political pawn. Certainly she is not the first as far as the murky world of the Olympics is concerned and she won’t be the last. It is hardly surprising certain members of the IoC abused the rules and their privileges over the years because the Olympics wields incredible power, prestige and opportunity for corruption.

If there is one man who can be accused of ruining the original attempts to expand Roland Garros – a political football that has been kicked around the 16th arrondisement for the past ten years – it is Seb Coe. The Olympic champion did nothing wrong, of course. He just used his charm and clout to win London the 2012 Olympics in the face of a fierce challenge from Paris.

Had Paris won, it had already been agreed that a tiny section of the otherwise untouchable Bois de Boulogne, just across the freeway from the Porte Marcel Bernard, would have been provided for the construction of a new stadium. Anything for the Olympics. As soon as Paris lost, permission was withdrawn.

The French Federation is playing an integral part in the current bid because Roland Garros, still trying to stretch its borders, will host at least two sports apart from tennis if Paris is successful. There will be Handball play offs on the main Philippe Chatrier Centre Court and boxing on the 10,000 seat Court Suzanne Lenglen.

Timing, as we know, is everything, and it was particularly unfortunate for Sharapova in this instance. However, the extent to which drug abuse of any kind, no matter how large, small or unintentional, is considered a crime only one notch lower than murder was also highlighted by the fact that a 24 -year-old French player of little repute, Constant Lestienne, was offered a qualifying wild card despite a history that had seen him place illegal bets on matches no less than 220 times between 2012 and 2015.

Sharapova, in contrast, was tested positive just once for a substance that had been legal two weeks before. The difference? Drugs.

In Maria’s case there is, of course, another factor – image. As Guy Forget admitted during our lengthy conversation, if it had been some lower ranked player from South America, the issue would not have attracted nearly as much controversy.

Many of the headlines have been writ large because Sharapova is not only a five time Grand Slam champion and, along with Serena Williams, the only true global super star on the WTA tour but because she is tall, beautiful, rich and is disliked in the locker room.

The willingness of some players such as Kiki Mladenovic, Genie Bouchard and Mirjana Lucic-Baroni to speak out against her has given the media all the excuse it needs to ramp up the scandal. Bouchard’s attack on Maria’s attitude towards her fellow players – distant would be one way to describe it – was rich considering during the one successful year she enjoyed on the tour in 2014 the young Canadian had insisted that she did not consider the locker room the place to make friends. By attacking Sharapova, she suddenly discovered she had a few.

Lucic-Baroni, unhappily for a player who has suffered so much in her private life from an abusive father, went further than the rest after Sharapova had been forced retire in the third set of their match in Rome with a muscle strain. Lucic-Baroni went out on a very shaky limb and talked of Sharapova in the same breath as Lance Armstrong. “How is it any different?” she asked.

With that statement, one would imagine Lucic-Baroni was edging towards slander. No matter what Maria’s rivals want to believe, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) put one very significant sentence into their finding after Sharapova had appealed the two year ban imposed by the ITF. “She should not be considered a deliberate doper.”

It needed to be said and, sadly, the exact facts need to be laid out yet again for those who insist on repeating allegations that are simply not true.

Those critics who call Sharapova a drug cheat need to ask themselves one question: Is Sharapova exceedingly stupid? If she deliberately took Meldonium, which she knew as Mildronite, three days before the 2016 Australian Open where she knew, without question, that she would be tested, the answer would have to be ‘yes’. But anyone who has sat in on her press conferences over the years, knows that there are few brighter athletes in the world.

Yes, as she freely admits, she got far too complacent; didn’t pay attention to an email she should have read and has paid a heavy price. That does not make her a cheat.

In my opinion, the real culprit is WADA. This is a controversy entirely of their own making, primarily because they are an inefficient organization that does not do it’s homework. They chose an arbitrary date – 1st January 2016 – to turn a drug supplement widely used in Eastern Europe (but not considered potent enough to be bought over the counter by any visiting Western athletes) and made it illegal BEFORE they had discovered how long Meldonium stays in the human body.

So, as many athletes did who were later tested positive, Sharapova could have said she took the last dose on 30th December. When I interviewed her for the London Times Magazine in March (the first talk I had ever had with her, incidentally) I started to make this suggestion but she cut me off in mid-sentence. “No, no, I would never have tried to go that route,” she said vehemently. “That’s not who I am. I made a mistake and I owned up to it.”

When, during that visit to Manhattan Beach, I asked her coach Sven Groeneveld why he had stuck with her through those 15 months, he replied, “Because I have never worked with anyone with such integrity, honesty, loyalty or with such an incredible work ethic.”

Groeneveld helped Monica Seles, Mary Pierce and Ana Ivanovic win Grand Slam titles and could get virtually any job he wanted as a coach. So if you want to counter that assessment of Sharapova, not being friendly to rivals is probably not sufficient.

If it is hard to deny that Sharapova has integrity, it is ironic that the French Federation President cited the need to maintain the integrity of the sport as a reason for denying Sharapova a wild card. You do not lack integrity just because you make a very bad administrative error, especially when you accept all the blame and do not sack any of your equally culpable staff.

But, given their history of corruption, I do not find that the words Olympic movement and integrity fit very comfortably side by side.

And WADA? Have they tried to clean up the mess by furthering their investigation of just how much of a performance enhancer Meldonium really is? According to Ben Nichols, who has since departed his taxing post as their PR director, WADA are not conducting any further tests on Meldonium. A separate organization may be doing some research, apparently, but not WADA – not the body who wields life and death decisions over athletes. It is really time they stepped up and did their job –properly.

In the meantime, all those players who have a nice big mug of coffee prior to a match should stop and think before they try to call Sharapova cheat for having used Meldonium before 2016. Caffeine was once illegal because it is known to concentrate the mind and therefore help performance. I understand it is under review again. But right now it is perfectly permissible for a player to drink as much as he or she wants. Just as, before 1st January 2016, it was NOT illegal for Sharapova take as many Mildronate tablets as she wanted. The reasons for her doing so are immaterial. After all, players may drink coffee just because they like the taste.

http://www.10sballs.com/2017/05/20/parispovagate-by-richard-evans/

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