Il tennis sta facendo abbastanza sul doping? (USA Today)

20-10-2012

By every measure, Sara Errani is enjoying a career year.

The diminutive Italian cracked the top 10, reached a maiden Grand Slam final at Roland Garros and surged to the No. 1 doubles ranking after winning the U.S. Open with partner Roberta Vinci. Next week, for the first time, she will be among the eight players competing in the WTA Championships in Istanbul.

But the 5-4 ½ native of Bologna has been dogged by questions since reports surfaced in July linking her to dirty doctor Luis García del Moral -- questions that again surfaced last month when Errani advanced to her first singles semifinal in New York.

Del Moral, a physician on Lance Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service team, received a lifetime ban from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) for his activities in cycling, which the International Tennis Federation (ITF) recognized this summer.

Errani, who has never failed a drug test, has distanced herself from del Moral.

But her case and others have raised concerns inside and outside the sport that enough is being done to ensure it does not end up like other scandal-ridden sports such as cycling, baseball and sprinting that have seen exponential advances in strength, endurance and speed.

"In tennis I'm sure there are guys who are doing it, getting away with it, and getting ahead of the testers," American veteran James Blake said during the U.S. Open.

Blake says he wants to believe it's a level playing field, "but I also am realistic with this much money involved, $1.9 million for the winner of the U.S. Open, people will try to find a way to get ahead."

He is not alone.

This week, former French Open champion Yannick Noah broadened his controversial comments made last November about Spanish athletes to the newspaper the Australian. Without backing down, he said he feared doping is more wide-ranging than he previously believed.

"Look what happened in cycling with Lance Armstrong. It took ... 10 years to find something that everyone already knew long ago. This is very sad," he said.

It's impossible to know how prevalent performance enhancing drug use is in tennis.

Smatterings of cases -- 37 in the past 10 years, including wheelchair athletes -- have been reported by the ITF.

Administrators in the sport say are doing the best they can.

"To think there is no doping is tennis is naïve," says Stuart Miller, who oversees the sport's anti-doping program for the ITF. "At the other end of the spectrum, is it reasonable to assume that doping is endemic within tennis? We have no evidence."

Miller spoke to USA TODAY Sports during the U.S. Open.

The ITF's anti-doping budget is about $1.6 million, according to published reports (Miller would not confirm or deny this figure). Funding comes from the four Grand Slam tournaments, the ATP and WTA tours, and the ITF.

Considering the big bucks in the game -- prize money at this year's U.S. Open topped $26 million -- the budget represents a small slice of the revenue pie.

But what is too much or too little? It's not easy to cross-analyze sports. Financing mechanisms, governance and screening protocols vary widely.

For instance, Major League Baseball, in which players are represented by a union, conducts more than 15,000 tests per year on major and minor league players.

The PGA Tour funds 100% of its program but only tests at tournaments, practice rounds and pro-am days.

For the last four years, the ITF has conducted roughly 2,000 drug tests annually, according to the ITF's published statistics (2012 numbers are not yet available).

The majority of tests occur within competition. All in-and out-of-competition tests are done with no advance notice, said Miller.

Last year 1206 men and 944 women underwent in- and out-of-competition urine and blood tests. For the top 150 ranked players, that works out to about eight per man and six per woman annually.

Just 21 were out-of-competition blood tests.

"If we had more resources then we'd like to do more," says Miller, noting that the ITF had increased screening for human growth hormone (HGH) and other synthetic testosterone. "It's clear that other sports are able to do more testing through whatever funding mechanisms they have."

David Howman, director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), said in a recent phone interview he had no issues with tennis from a compliance perspective.

"Nobody has come up with a formula that says it's enough," said Howman when asked about the number of tests in tennis. "You have to be economical and wise in the way that you use your money."

But some like Blake and Noah do not rest easy that the sport is keeping up with cheaters.

Dick Pound, a founder and former chairman of WADA, called the number of out-of-competition tests in tennis last year -- 195 urine and 21 blood tests -- "very small."

In a phone from his base in Montreal, Pound added that any player that tests positive at an event like the U.S. Open has "failed a drug test as well as an IQ test."

That's because evading detection when athletes know when they could be sent to anti-doping control is not difficult.

The ITF's program, which adheres to the WADA code, requires roughly the top 60 ranked men and women to provide advance notice of their whereabouts and a generic time of day, say 8 a.m., where testers can find them at all times.

But that may not be such a fail-proof deterrent.

According to Pound, cheaters involved in a "micro-dosage program" could use blood boosting products like Erythropoietin (EPO) or synthetic testosterone and clean it from their system in six to eight hours -- much like Armstrong and his seven Tour de France winning teams did, according to the USADA report last week detailing allegations of widespread doping that caused the American cyclist to step down from his own cancer-fighting charity Wednesday.

"If you know you have a window for it, that's all the time you need," Pound said. "By 8 a.m. when testers come, you're clean."

In tennis, administering a testing protocol has many challenges. There are no training camps, charter flights or regularly set schedules.

Players operate as independent contractors that move around the globe at will and often duck out of town quickly when they lose.

The nearly 11-month season means players are almost constantly in competition. But they are likewise aware of the weeks and days they could be tested and by and large choose their own schedules.

No doubt, matches are more physically grueling than ever.

Andy Murray needed a record-tying 4 hours and 54 minutes to defeat Novak Djokovic in the Flushing Meadows final -- and that was an hour less than Djokovic's nearly six-hour win against Rafael Nadal at January's Australian Open final.

Many top players now travel with a team that includes physios, masseurs and fitness coaches because stamina, strength and recovery are so integral to success.

Doping is a touchy subject with players.

Ask around, and some will decline to comment for fear of smearing the sport or implicating peers. A few discuss it cautiously.

"It's always going to be in the back of your mind," said 2005 U.S. Open semifinalist Robby Ginepri of the USA.

Janko Tipsarevic, who finished in the top 10 last year for the first time, said he had been tested frequently "maybe because I broke through."

The ninth-ranked Serb described how specimen handlers showed up at his door in Africa where he trains during the offseason.

"They came to me in Kenya," he said incredulously. "I believe that tennis is way cleaner than people think it is," added Tipsarevic, who reached the U.S. Open quarterfinals.

ITF president Francesco Ricci Bitti, who also sits on WADA's executive board, called tennis' program one of the "leaders" in professional athletics. He added that in testing quality was more important than quantity.

"We don't pretend to be perfect," Ricci Bitti said in an interview last month, while emphasizing that he felt the budget allotted to testing was adequate.

A few wonder why the majority of doping cases often involve lower-ranked players.

Players caught are "usually not a factor really on tour," says 34-year-old American Michael Russell.

However, in 1998 Petr Korda was caught for taking the steroid nandrolone at Wimbledon a few months after winning the 1998 Australian Open.

Sesil Karatantcheva, a Bulgarian now competing for Kazakhstan, also tested positive for nandrolone in 2005 and served a two-year-ban. She was 16 years old at the time.

The ITF's Miller took umbrage at the idea that any players receive favorable testing circumstances, and he pointed out that former No. 1 Martina Hingis, former top-10 player Richard Gasquet and 2005 French Open finalist Mariano Puerta all failed drug tests and served suspensions.

Hingis and Gasquet were banned for cocaine, which some consider to have questionable, if any, performance enhancing properties.

But the sport's most notorious doping case of late wasn't brought to light through testing.

Wayne Odesnik, an American once ranked as high as No. 77, was nabbed by Australian customs officials in January 2010 for attempting to import HGH.

For eighth-ranked Errani, questions will likely persist, as with any of several players associated with Valencia-based del Moral.

Others linked with the tennis academy where del Moral often saw clients include former women's No 1 Dinara Safina, top-5 Spaniard David Ferrer and Russia's Igor Andreev.

"Of course it's not a good thing for me," the 25-year-old Errani told a small group of reporters in August at a WTA event in Mason, Ohio. "When you (win), people start to tell you something bad."

When she was pressed again in New York, she claimed to have cut ties with the doctor.

"But of course I'm not interested…to keep working with one person that is involved in these things," she responded, though she pointed out correctly that the ITF cannot compel players to disassociate from any person.

Pound said the ultimate question is whether the ITF's program, and others like it, "are actually designed to succeed or designed to fail and merely cover their butts."