Maria Sharapova — A Heart Drug, a Calendar She Didn’t Read, and Fifteen Months

Maria Sharapova, the five-time Grand Slam champion and for eleven straight years the world’s highest-earning female athlete, was banned for doping in 2016 — not for a steroid or a transfusion, but for a Latvian heart drug she had been taking openly for a decade, which the World Anti-Doping Agency had added to its prohibited list on the first day of that year. She tested positive at the Australian Open in January; the International Tennis Federation banned her two years in June; and on appeal the Court of Arbitration for Sport cut the sanction to fifteen months in October 2016, holding that she had not cheated on purpose but had still failed to do the one thing required of her — check whether her medication was still legal.

The substance was meldonium, sold under the brand name Mildronate, manufactured in Latvia and prescribed across the former Soviet bloc. Sharapova said a family doctor had put her on it in 2006 for a cluster of complaints — frequent illness, irregular EKG readings, a family history of diabetes. WADA banned it effective January 1, 2016, on evidence that athletes were using it to aid endurance and recovery. Sharapova kept taking it, and on January 26, 2016, a sample at the Australian Open came back positive. She had, in the most literal sense, been doping with a drug she had declared to no one because she had stopped reading the list that now contained it.

What makes the case unusual is how little of it turned on chemistry and how much on paperwork. Nobody disputed what was in her system or why. The fight was entirely about fault — how careless an athlete has to be, and how clearly a federation has to warn, before a positive for a newly banned drug becomes two years rather than fifteen months. The CAS panel found fault on both sides, hers for not checking and the testers’ for burying the change in a wall of email, and split the difference.

It cost her the back half of a season, a chunk of her ranking, and the immediate suspension of contracts with Nike, Porsche, and TAG Heuer. It did not cost her a Grand Slam title; the only result disqualified was her quarter-final at the 2016 Australian Open. The verdict on record is a ban, and a relatively short one, for the rarest kind of doping case: the athlete caught by a change of rules rather than a change of behaviour.