Anti-doping measures in tennis: sufficient, or shallow?

Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have given rise to the ‘Golden Age’ of tennis; but can the Golden Age remain free of the ghost of doping?

Lance Armstrong may have made some questionable choices in his career, but his fall from grace has inadvertently set in motion a chain of events that could eventually make the sporting world a more honest place. For one thing, the Armstrong saga has made tennis, a sport that has generally enjoyed a squeaky clean image over the years, start attracting questions about whether the administrators are doing enough to prevent doping.

Almost as if on cue, the International Tennis Federeration (ITF) has banned Czech player Barbora Zahlavova Strycova for six months after she tested positive for a banned substance in October. The timing of the ITF’s decision couldn’t have been better, but is this simply a case of being in the right place at the right time, a luxury that has very rarely been bestowed upon tennis?

The anti-doping section on the official ITF website is surprisingly detailed, with extensive pages spelling out exactly what measures have been put in place to curb drug use in tennis. If anything, the doping law almost looks too draconian; put yourself in a tennis player’s shoes, and you will likely be completely bewildered at the amount of things you are supposed to know just to make sure you can compete in the sport that you love.

For instance, the ‘prohibited list’, which mentions the substances that are outlawed, is not only an insanely long list filled with very complex names, but it also changes every year. So a player would almost be compelled to memorize the names of all the substances in the list if he or she wants to be completely sure of staying in the clear. (Suddenly, all those chemistry lessons I took in school don’t sound so hard).

The anti-doping laws in tennis are certainly transparent, which is not entirely unexpected, when you consider the fierce criticism that the sport drew when news of Andre Agassi‘s crystal meth cover-up first broke out.

Scratch the surface, however, and it becomes all too evident that the mechanism in tennis is not nearly as intensive as that in, say, cycling; it’s easy to see how the law can be bent with just a little creativity. For instance, the ‘therepautic use exemption’, which allows a player with an illness or condition to use a banned substance after obtaining prior permission, sounds more like an open invitation for fraud than a provision for exceptional circumstances.

But the real problem is with the finances: the annual funding for anti-doping measures in 2013 has been budgeted at $2 million, which is a paltry amount to say the least. To put it in perspective, Novak Djokovic earned more money – half a million more – for winning the year’s first Grand Slam in Melbourne.

$2 million doesn’t sound nearly enough to facilitate exhaustive testing in a sport with more than 2,000 athletes, and the stats reinforce that: in 2011, the last year for which numbers are available, 168 in-competition blood tests were carried out, and the figure dwindles to an alarming 39 for out-of-competition blood tests.

The total number of tests carried out in 2011 (both blood and urine) amounted to 3,356; if you assume that in any given year there are roughly 1,000 players (men and women) who actively play on the highest stages in tennis, you get an average of 3.35 tests per player in an entire year. That’s not a very comforting figure.

The out-of-competition ‘whereabouts’ program was supposed to be the answer to all of the sport’s doping worries. For the program to work, a pool of players called the ‘International Registered Testing Pool’ (IRTP) has been established; the pool includes (but is not limited to) the ATP top 50, WTA top 50, top 10 doubles players and top 5 men, women and quad wheelchair players.

The players in this pool are required to give the authorities information of their whereabouts for every day of the year, so that surprise out-of-competition tests can be carried out on them. The program sounds reassuringly stringent in theory, but hasn’t gained too much traction in reality. Even aside from the obvious (but perhaps unavoidable) limitation of having only the top players subjected to it, the program is not very prolific at testing the players that are actually in the IRTP.

Mike Bryan, the No. 1 doubles player in the world, has gone on record to say that he hasn’t been blood tested out of competition a single time. Bryan did also reveal that he has been given the occasional out-of-competition urine test, but as we all know thanks to Mr. Armstrong and his headline-grabbing antics, urine tests are simply not as effective as blood tests. [For the uninformed, substances like human growth hormone (HGH) are not detected in urine tests].

Credit the players for speaking out about the deficiencies in tennis’s anti-doping regulations. Roger Federer has repeatedly called for more testing, and while speaking at the ongoing Rotterdam tournament he urged the Grand Slams to be a little more generous so that the anti-doping authorities would have greater financial resources to work with (a substantial part of the anti-doping budget is funded by the Slams). Federer, of course, was his usual diplomatic self while making these statements, insisting that “tennis is very clean, there’s maybe one case a year and they are not all done on purpose”.

World No. 1 Novak Djokovic has been less diplomatic, bluntly stating at the Australian Open that he hadn’t been subjected to a single blood test in the previous 6 to 7 months, and that the tests were more frequent in the past. Andy Murray has been similarly forthright, declaring that “if one in 100 players is doping, then, in my eyes, that isn’t a clean sport” and urging the authorities to institute the biological passport method to check doping in tennis.

(The biological passport, a system which detects changes in biological markers in the blood rather than looking for specific drugs, has also been advocated by Federer, and last heard, it was being given serious consideration by the ITF).

The general comment from the tennis world on the existing state of doping regulations in the sport is that it is far from satisfactory. Darren Cahill has even gone as far as saying that tennis’s drug-testing program “has gone backwards in recent years”.

Clearly, tennis’s anti-doping program needs reforms, and quickly. This has been seconded by none other than John Fahey, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. Fahey believes that tennis has an “effective anti-doping program”, but that there is a need to step up the measures even further.

Fahey laid special stress on the paucity of blood testing in tennis. In 2011, only about 6% of all the tests carried out were blood tests; the corresponding numbers for cycling and athletics were 35% and 17.6% respectively.

“If there are insufficient blood samples being taken then athletes will become aware of that and make it the drug of their choice because they know the sport does not pay attention to blood testing. I would like to see a compulsory percentage of all tests being blood to make sure that some of these areas are not slipping through the loop,” Fahey told reporters last month.

There are calls for change coming from within as well as without. So the question needs to be asked: how soon will the ITF act on those calls? It probably wouldn’t be feasible to implement the biological passport system any time soon, but an increase in percentage of blood testing, and number of tests overall, seems to be an urgent requirement.

For either of those things to happen, of course, the loose change that is currently being passed off as the anti-doping fund needs to be enhanced substantially. And that, in turn, can only happen if the Grand Slam and ATP/WTA treasurers deign to loosen their purses so that the doping police can go about the vulgar business of drug-testing without the fear of running out of money.

Are the tennis authorities ready to spare some cash to ensure that the sport remains clean and drug-free?

It has never been more evident that the ITF needs to bring more intensity to its anti-doping measures. The sport may have survived the occasional Petr Korda pickle or the rare Mariana Puerto mess (not to mention the mysterious Wayne Odesnik waterloo), and every now and then a Barbora Zahlavova Strycova situation springs up to assure the fans that things are being done to curb the menace.

But if something were to come up that raised doubts about the authenticity of the current ‘Golden Age’ of tennis, then the sport might find it difficult to recover, just as cycling is finding out to its horror. Let us hope that the ITF acts in time, so that the Golden Age of tennis remains golden.