Magic potions and unanswered questions: does tennis have a doping problem?

Fewer than 80 players have been popped for juicing since 1968

September, 2023

Is it more remarkable that Romanian two-time Grand Slam tennis champion Simona Halep took performance enhancing drugs, or that she was caught? I ask only because the sport’s authorities seem to catch vanishingly few dopers, which surely means either they’re very bad at it, or elite players rarely cheat to win enormous sums of money.  

Certainly, it’s easy to be cynical about tennis. When in 2017 I interviewed legendary doping chemist Angel ‘Memo’ Hernandez – who during the nineties and 2000s was the world’s leading illicit sports chemist, providing undetectable super-stimulants to a wide range of household name athletes – he burst out laughing when I asked about doping in tennis.  

‘Tennis was paradise for a long time. No testing involved. No testing. They were in paradise, enjoying their stuff, loving their stuff. No testing at all. Now I believe they have started testing, but it is still a joke,’ he said.  

Halep on Monday was banned for four years after a urine sample she gave at last year’s US Open was found to contain Roxadustat, an anti-anaemia drug that just happens to stimulate production of the red blood cells so vital for physical endurance. Halep denies knowingly taking the drug.

Her case carried echoes of that of five-time Grand Slam winner Maria Sharapova, who in 2016 was the last high profile tennis player to be sanctioned for doping when she was popped at the Australian Open for taking Meldonium, a drug newly added to the WADA anti-doping list, used to treat ischaemia by enabling increased blood flow – and with it improving aerobic capability.  

It is surprisingly difficult to find an exact figure for how many top-level tennis players have been caught taking performance enhancing drugs – as opposed to recreational drugs ultimately harmful to performance, such as cocaine – since the Open era began in 1968. According to Wikipedia, it’s less than 80, which is a tiny fraction of the thousands of players who have competed in Grand Slam events during that time.   

Halep, Sharapova and Marin Cilic (who received a four month ban in 2013 for ingesting the stimulant Nikethamide) aside – those who have been caught have hardly been a roll-call of the sport’s greatest luminaries. They include Wayne Odesnik, Mariano Puerta and Barbora Strýcová. No, me neither.  

But the feeling persists that tennis, and the media that covers it, doesn’t help itself when it comes to the wider perception that all might not be as it seems at the sport’s highest levels.   

When the greatest ever player Novak Djokovic was caught on camera appearing to inhale a gas from an opaque water bottle during his Wimbledon victory over Tim van Rijthoven in 2022, he simply told reporters at a subsequent press conference that the bottle had contained a ‘magic potion’ and added that it enhanced his performance. ‘It helps’, he said. No one asked him to elaborate any further. 

A few days later, after winning tennis’ most prestigious tournament, he once again refused in front of journalists to explain what the so-called magic potion contained and instead talked vaguely about one day marketing it. He even told a reporter that if he tried the potion he too ‘might win Wimbledon’. Everyone laughed and no one asked him to elaborate any further. He still hasn’t said what was in the bottle, and no reporter has asked him about it in public since. 

While there is no suggestion, or indeed evidence, Djokovic has ever taken any form of illegal performance enhancing drug, his secrecy on the topic of what he ingested during the match with Rijthoven raises important questions. Most obviously: why the need for secrecy? And isn’t it ultimately bad for tennis?  

In 2016, former world number one Sir Andy Murray said:  

‘I have played against players and thought: “they won’t go away, or they don’t seem to be getting tired.” Have I ever been suspicious of someone? Yeah. You hear things.  

It’s harder to tell in our sport as people can make big improvements to a stroke or start serving better because they have made technical changes. If it’s purely physical and you’re watching someone playing six-hour matches over and over and showing no signs of being tired, you’d look at that.’  

Boris Becker, then Djokovic’s coach, was quick publicly to rebuke Murray for his comments. ‘We have random drug testing and unless it’s proven, they are 100 per cent innocent… I believe 100 per cent Andy is clean. Roger [Federer] is clean. Rafa [Nadal] is clean. Novak gets tested a lot. That can mean twice in a Grand Slam’, he said.  

A remarkable aspect of the evolution of modern men’s tennis is the increasing durability of the sport’s best players since the 1980s. To pluck a few great champions at random, Andre Agassi was 32 when he won his last Grand Slam, Pete Sampras 31, Jimmy Connors 31 and Becker 28. Nadal, Federer and Djokovic have all won Grand Slams aged 36.   

Perhaps one aspect of tennis that causes journalists covering it to be hesitant about asking questions that are anything other than fawning is the astonishing tribalism and aggression of many of the fans of the sport’s biggest stars.   

In November last year, I experienced this first-hand when I reposted on what was then Twitter, now X, video footage I had seen showing Djokovic’s team seemingly trying to hide a concoction they were making for him in the stands at the Paris Masters, commenting that it looked dodgy and asking if anyone could explain what was going on. What followed was a tsunami of online abuse, including not just threats of physical violence toward me, but also toward my family. Tennis, it turns out, isn’t as genteel as it looks.     

For what it’s worth, Djokovic is far from alone in receiving mysterious drinks from team members in the stands, transported via ball boys or girls, during matches, or even disappearing for strangely long toilet breaks during difficult moments in competition only to emerge sufficiently reinvigorated to seize victory. Many of his rivals do exactly the same sorts of thing.  

Earlier this month, there was online outrage over footage of Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz, the game’s newest hot-shot, receiving an actual test-tube containing pills from his team mid-match against Britain’s Dan Evans at the US Open. This sort of thing didn’t used to happen.  

Halep, naturally, is appealing the decision against her. Good luck to her. I grow increasingly convinced no one any longer really cares who is doping and who is not in all top-level sport, much less tennis – how else to explain journalists’ apathy toward it – on the basis that so much of the evidence we see with our own eyes suggests virtually everyone must be at it.   

If that’s the case, then why hang poor Halep out to dry? It’s easier, surely, just to enjoy the spectacle and believe in the magic. 

This article was originally published by the Spectator