An erstwhile Indian Olympic Association eminence grise once bristled indignantly as, after the Rio Games, a gymnast from eastern India had been caught for doping: “The fool couldn’t fool them,” he bellowed. The story’s moral was not his chief concern, someone being caught was. That happens to be a measure and symptom of the times we live in: if you get away with it, you are all right. But Simona Halep, the Romanian girl with two Grand Slam trophies currently obliged to cope with a four-year ban has said something which, even if mostly bypassed by the media, calls for serious attention.
The app by means of which the International Tennis Integrity Agency stays in communication with players, is flawed, she has said. There are no frills in it: it just doesn’t really work at its best, which is quite bothersome. Then you hear of Patrick Mouratoglou, once Serana Williams’ long-term tutor, who, alluding to Halep, has charged the ITIA with “destroying the careers of young players.” Halep though had found herself at odds with tennis’ book of rules and those tasked with ensuring a general adherence to it not only for allegedly using a blood-booster but also because of what were called “irregularities” in her “athlete biological passport.”
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When she was hit with the ban order, it was said that she had “ingested a contaminated supplement,” making things slightly more complicated by having no blood test records between April and September 2022. It could be part of the rules, or conventions, of the officials of the game that while women are held to a standard people deem pretty hard, Martina Hingis, Maria Sharapova, Barbara Zahlaviva-Stryciva are among previously punished mistake-makers, Andre Agassi, Richard Gasquet, Marin Cilic and Victor Troiki are considered examples of gently treated men in the game of a morally mixed lot. How authorities deal with them is thought, wrongly or not, is all about how they wish to go about it, which is deeply disturbing. And something Spectator has of late said about Novak Djokovic has had people aghast. The story had Djokovic inhaling something from an opaque water bottle after a match and then bypassing answering the Press what it was.
An inquirer hinting at a mild degree of persistence was told that if he had put his nose to it, he would have been a winner too. You, of course, cannot keep a good man down but you also notice tennis’ understated reluctance to get too far with it. The same liveand-let-live liberalism manifests itself at all events, major or minor, including the Olympics and the World Cups and all that is spectacularly sensational. So there is legal doping with steroids, there are instances of blood doping and gene doping. Just about everything is par for the course. Well might you wonder if you are to sit down before the telly when something big is next up?
