Tennis wants to keep pretending its non-existent doping problem isn’t about something else

Open this photo in gallery: Poland's Iga Swiatek returns the ball against Italy's Jasmine Paolini during the Billie Jean King Cup semi-final tennis match at Martin Carpena Sports Hall in Malaga, southern Spain, on Nov. 18.Manu Fernandez/The Associated Press

Tennis doesn’t have a doping problem. That would suggest someone is concerned about all the doping, which they aren’t.

What tennis has is a talking-about-doping problem. Everybody else wants to do that, and tennis would prefer not to.

On Thursday, the No. 2 women’s player in the world, Iga Swiatek, was suspended for a month. She tested positive for TMZ (trimetazidine), a drug used to treat angina.

But don’t worry. She didn’t mean to take it. At the same time authorities announced her failed drug test and suspension, they also noted that the TMZ Swiatek ingested was hidden in an over-the-counter sleep aid. Who provided that information to testers? Swiatek’s team.

Sounds pretty air tight to me.

Swiatek failed the drug test in mid-August. She was allowed to play in the U.S. Open, where she lost in the quarter-finals. A couple of days after that last major of the year, she started her suspension. She blamed her absence from three subsequent tournaments on fatigue. No one said anything about a drug test.

On the other side of the bracket, men’s No. 1 Jannik Sinner is in a death match with the World Anti-Doping Agency over his own adventures in chemistry.

In March, Sinner twice tested positive for a clostebol, a banned steroid. This was weeks after he’d won the Australian Open and been anointed the successor to tennis’s holy trinity – Djokovic, Nadal and Federer.

Sinner was provisionally suspended. The Italian’s team went all CSI on the situation. They figured out that the drug was hidden in a spray used to treat a wound.

The same authority that bought Swiatek’s explanation, the International Tennis Integrity Agency, bought Sinner’s excuse even harder. It didn’t suspend him at all.

WADA, which is the ITIA’s effective boss, didn’t like that decision. WADA has appealed Sinner’s non-punishment to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. It would like to see him suspended from one to two years. I guess it doesn’t buy the magic spray bottle theory. Because it is the expert, shouldn’t it know?

That’s three current or former tennis No. 1s – Swiatek, Sinner and Simona Halep – who’ve been caught doping in the past two years. But don’t worry. It’s not a problem. Stop saying that. It’s just a series of coincidences.

It’s no mystery why tennis is having this trouble, because it may be the most physically gruelling of our popular pastimes.

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I’m not talking about the guy in the park standing in one spot whacking balls into the net. I’m talking about two, three, four hours of running side-to-side wind sprints, feet flat on the ground, the rest of you bent over at 90 degrees, twisting around like you’re dodging bullets.

This week, former U.S. Open champion Juan Martin del Potro discussed the toll that exacts. After years of knee problems, the 36-year-old Argentine describes his daily life as “a never-ending nightmare.”

Football players get a week off between scourgings. Sometimes two. Tennis players have to go out and do it every day. The better you are, the more you play. The more you play, the more people want to see you, so the more you play.

Unlike team athletes, tennis pros don’t get paid while they recover. Every day they’re stuck in the training room, it costs them money. No wonder they’re on drugs. I’d be on drugs, too.

It’s one thing to stand on necessity. Most people would buy a Sinner or a Swiatek saying, ‘I don’t do this to make me better than everyone else. I do it so I can get out of bed in the morning.’

But few sports have the guts to try that, or its even more obvious solution – stop testing.

The NFL stands out as the only league that has rejected hypocrisy by rejecting drug testing.

Football players are tested, but only a handful of NFLers have been suspended this calendar year for PEDs. Have you watched football lately? Do you think all the 300-pound men run like sprinters because they switched to a protein-rich diet? Everybody knows the deal here.

Ten years ago, people would have worried about the players’ health. The concussion ‘crisis’ took care of that problem. Not by making the players safer, but by giving the public a choice – stop watching football or stop pretending to care. They chose the latter.

Now football has no drug problem and no injury problem. They have a where-do-we-put-all-this-money? problem. Others might learn from their example.

Tennis can’t get itself there. It wants to keep pretending.

Though undignified, pretending still works. Again, everyone knows what’s going on here, but that hasn’t changed consumer behaviour.

Nobody cares if Jannik Sinner is a doper. They’re too busy marvelling at how a 6-foot-2 guy can move around a tennis court like he’s on skates.

What people really want is to be assured that if they drop a whack of dough on tickets to Wimbledon that all the best players in the world will be there, whether they’re injured or not. Do what you gotta do. If that’s the special spray bottle or the ‘experimental’ stem-cell treatment, that is entirely the player’s concern. There is absolutely no need to run it by the fans first.

Swiatek represents the next stage in this ‘we have to ask, but don’t tell and maybe just start your holidays early’ approach. The world is being made aware of the charge, the trial, the appeal, the ruling, the punishment and the release all at the same time.

Nobody in charge contradicted her when she was out there telling porky pies about her suspension. Tennis officialdom didn’t just go along with it. They facilitated it.

Eventually, they’ll save up all the drug announcements for the day after the player retires. ‘What a legend. We’ll miss her. Also, she was so full of banned heart medication that we had to check if she had a heart.’

Is any of this a problem? Not if you never talk about it. And definitely not if the money keeps rolling in.

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