Is tennis tainted by drug abuse?

Doping and drug scandals have become a worryingly ubiquitous feature of modern sport ever since Lance Armstrong’s systematic cheating was dramatically exposed earlier this year.

Indeed, this cataclysmic wound to public faith in cycling will take a long time to heal; even as Chris Froome stormed to victory in the 2013 Tour de France he faced continuous questioning from foreign media outlets about whether he was doping.

Cycling is not an isolated affair, with the use of stimulants plaguing the history of athletics. Justin Gatlin’s four year ban in 2007 removed his then world record 100m time, whilst the infamous 1988 Olympic 100m winner Ben Johnson was banned for life just a few days after claiming gold.

The last few months have reignited the doping debate, with two of the most high-profile sprinters, Asafa Powell and Tyson Gay, testing positive for banned substances.

Of course, every professional sport will always have those who try to gain an advantage over their opponents, and as testing methods progress, so do ways of avoiding them. As the director general of the World Anti Doping Agency David Howman put it, “the way the world works is that, when the good guys advance, so do the bad guys.”

It is the progress the so called ‘bad guys’ seem to be have been making which is most worrying for tennis, a sport which on the surface appears to have remained relatively drug free.

However as it reaches arguably its most physically demanding era, questions have emerged over the efficacy of anti-drug measures currently in place by the ATP. These questions have further intensified over the past month with the announcement of an 18-month ban for Victor Troicki for skipping a drug test.

Interestingly, the most strident calls for more drug testing have come from the players themselves; earlier this year Roger Federer called for increased testing and claimed it was ‘naïve’ to think tennis was clean. Andy Murray echoed this sentiment, even going as far to encourage reduced prize money if it resulted in more drug testing.

Although the International Tennis Federation (ITF) has now agreed to introduce ‘biological passports’ which allow comparison of physical data over a period of time, it remains to be seen how effective these will be.

However Murray and Federer’s complaints are not new and tennis has had its fair share of previous scandals. Guy Forget, ranked world number four in the early 1990s, alleged that he frequently played against players who were doping. The legendary John McEnroe has also retrospectively said that he was given steroids unbeknownst to him during his career. More recent issues have seen bans for successive French Open finalists Guillermo Coria in 2004 and Mariano Puerta in 2005.

Nonetheless with the lack of headline cases since 2005 (barring Richard Gasquet’s brush with cocaine), tennis appears to have kept ‘clean’: that is until the recent cases of Victor Troicki and Marin Cilic.

Earlier this year Roger Federer called for increased testing and claimed it was ‘naïve’ to think tennis was clean

Troicki, the former world number 12, appealed to the ITF to allow him to miss an April drug test due to illness, but was rejected and could face a ban until 2015.

More worryingly, reports from media outlets in Croatia have claimed that Cilic, who currently ranks 15th and was runner up to Andy Murray at Queens this year, failed a drug test in Munich in April. Some are even attributing this to his early withdrawal from Wimbledon this year, where he apparently first learnt of the results.

The ITF’s official policy is not to reveal provisional suspensions from the sport, but if Cilic is found guilty of drug abuse along with Troicki, it would mark a devastating moment for professional tennis.

Whilst public trust in the legitimacy of the sport has not been undermined to the extent of either cycling or athletics, the ITF will hope that the cases of Troicki and Cilic are not symptoms of a greater problem.

More personally, in an era of remarkable quality and consistency it would be deeply shocking for the integrity of players like Federer, Djokovic, Nadal and Murray to be called into question, especially after Murray’s first Wimbledon title this year.