To give or not to give, that is the question French Open organisers must answer over Maria Sharapova

Should they or shouldn't they give a wild card to the two-time Roland Garros champion as she gets set to return after her 15-month doping ban? Other athletes have been given second chances, so why not her?

Maria Sharapova hits during a World Team Tennis exhibition to benefit the Elton John AIDS Foundation on Monday, October 10, 2016, in Las Vegas. Isaac Brekken / AP Photo

The French Tennis Federation (FFT) is apparently facing a Shakespearean dilemma: To give or not to give a wild card to two-time Roland Garros champion Maria Sharapova for this year’s French Open.

The tournaments in Stuttgart, Rome and Madrid have happily embraced the Russian, who will be returning to competition on April 26 following a 15-month ban for a failed dope test, offering her wild cards, but the French Open organisers are still agonising over the decision.

“Our integrity is one of our strengths,” Bernard Giudicelli, the newly elected president of the FFT, was quoted as saying last week. “We can’t give a wild card to Sharapova and then invest €1.5 million [Dh5.8m] for the fight against doping.”

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While Giudicelli and the French Open are well within their rights to decide who they want to give a wild card to or not, the argument he presents seems a bit flawed.

Justin Gatlin, the American sprint star, has served two suspensions for doping – five years in total since 2001 – and yet he was a member of the United States team at the Rio Olympics last year, winning a silver medal in the 100 metres.

Nobody thought USA Track and Field was compromising its fight against doping by giving him a second and then a third chance.

Gatlin had failed a dope test and served his punishment for it. Sharapova has done the same, so all this moral posturing around her sounds a bit rich.

It is the sort of indignation that British Olympian Susan Egelstaff condemned last April in an interview to The Mixed Zone website.

“The morality police were out in force, decrying Sharapova for taking a drug for its performance-enhancing qualities,” said Egelstaff, who represented Great Britain in badminton at the 2012 London Games.

“This condemnation amazed and frankly stupefied me. There was a remarkable number of people who believed themselves qualified to judge what is morally acceptable in sport.”

Egelstaff then went on to question the very definition of performance-enhancing drugs, citing her own example.

“During qualifying for London 2012 [Olympics] I had severe pain in my foot,” she said. “I got a cortisone injection and within 24 hours I was completely pain-free.

“This injection was, indisputably, performance-enhancing. Without it I’m not sure I could have continued playing, with it I qualified for Team GB.”

There are many other doping experts who seem to agree with that notion.

“Painkillers really enhance performance,” Dr Hans Geyer, the then deputy director of the World Anti Doping Laboratory in Cologne, said in an interview to the BBC in 2012.

“It’s well known that [German Olympian] Andreas Erm who won a bronze medal in the 50km walk in the 2003 World Athletic Championship in Paris received pain killers several times during the walk – can you tell me this is not performance enhancing?

“His body was not able to walk 50km on this day in such a speed, but he won the bronze medal because he was treated with pain killing medications!”

Of course, there are others who will dispute that suggestion by saying pain killers do not enhance performance – they put you back at your previous levels. But there are doping experts who insist there is little evidence to suggest meldonium enhances performances.

That, however, does not mean Sharapova is innocent.

Meldonium was on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s prohibited substances list when she was tested at last year’s Australian Open and so, as the 33-page International Tennis Federation report stated in its conclusion, “She is the sole author of her own misfortune.”

She really is and, over the past 15 months, Sharapova has paid the price for it and will probably continue do so because coming back to the Tour will not be easy for her, especially not after statements from her peers over the past year.

In an interview last year, world No 5 Dominika Cibulkova described Sharapova as, “a totally unlikeable person. Arrogant, conceited and cold”. This means she might find little warmth or support in the locker rooms.

So to suggest wild cards will somehow make it any easier for Sharapova is probably a fallacy. She will still have to work her way back and fight many battles on the court and off it.

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