The friends of Maria Sharapova will gather around her gilded hem again. They will gaze into her soft, green eyes and see not duplicity or barefaced manipulation, but innocence, in every sense of that double-edged word.
Does she lack guile? No opponent who has felt the heat of her heavy racket or Russian-tipped tongue would fall in line with such a naïve judgment. But is she guilty of the crime that brought her career to a grinding halt on Wednesday afternoon?
Of the latter there can be no doubt –unless she proves otherwise in an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport after an independent tribunal under the aegis of the International Tennis Federation announced that she should be banished for two years for taking a banned substance during the Australian Open in January.
However, the Church of Maria will not sing that hymn. Their chorus will be one of adoration: “Ave, Maria!” Nevertheless, the crescendo will fall short of Walter Scott’s paean to another heroine of the same name: “Safe may we sleep beneath thy care, Though banish’d, outcast and reviled …”
Even full-blown sycophancy has its limits. All her career, though, Sharapova has been a statue to misunderstanding.
She is exquisitely perfect in image, but her pristine, shimmering blondeness remains a counterpoint to the most intimidating muscularity in the women’s game. Sharapova is not a ballerina. She is a beautiful assassin with a racket in her hand and a ruthless will to win in her heart.
The dichotomy has best been seen in one famous victory and 19 painful defeats. When Sharapova was 17, she defeated the much greater Serena Williams to win the Wimbledon title (having also beaten her the first time they met that 2004 summer). From that point until she lost to the American for the 19th time in a row, taking a mere five games off her in the quarter-finals of the Australian Open in Melbourne on 26 January this year, her fate was to suffer against her at every turn.
It was, in all probability, Sharapova’s last match: 4-6, 1-6 v Serena in an hour and 32 minutes.
How nobly she endured that and all the other humiliating defeats. None of her five victories in slam finals could match the manner of her losing against Williams. She took every hurtful crosscourt forehand winner with incomparable stoicism. She grunted even louder in response, straining all muscles and joints in the serve, running as fast as her long, gangly legs could carry her, but rarely with a dividend. She fought and screamed and sweated in public pain. It was truly heroic.
But, in what will almost certainly prove to be their final bout, she was carrying a secret aid in that quarter-final that would bring her down. Mildronate, she called the drug. Meldonium, said the ITF. But it was the same poisoned bullet.
She claimed it guarded against a family history of diabetes (with a fleeting and unconvincing reference to a heartbeat irregularity), and for 10 years her family doctor – the one back in Russia – had prescribed it for her.
If there is a family on the planet that has not had some relative with at least a hint of diabetic trouble, he or she will be residing on a mountain top far removed from modern society. And if a professional athlete can survive more than a decade of elite competition in a sport as physically brutal as modern tennis, that Mildronate truly must be a wonderful drug.
She said it did not help her illegally. She was unaware that it helped with the flow of oxygen through her system. She did not know she was doing anything wrong. She might well be right. But it will take a tsunami of schmooze to wash away the cynicism of non-believers.
Undermining her case further has been the almost daily disclosures in the country of her birth that other athletes had also been using the drug. Did all of them have such “health issues”? Were they all such ingenues?
The Russian Tennis Federation provisionally selected Sharapova for its Olympic team. It sounded so obviously like a loud and crude shout of support, rather than a considered decision. The shenanigans that have gone in drug-testing laboratories in that country make their support risible.
The Russians are not even certain to be in Rio. Certainly, Sharapova will not be there. Not wielding a racket, in any case.
She might well turn up selling her sweets – sugar-filled timebombs, surely, that will do no good to young children around the world hoping to avoid … diabetes.
Yet that, too, is of a piece with her contradictions. It is almost as if she is asking us to laugh along with her at the absurdity of the act. A few years ago she convinced a tennis writer she was seriously considering changing her surname by deed-poll in a Florida court to the similar-sounding name of her product (which will get no further play here) just before the US Open.
The prospect of Sharapova being thus announced on the Arthur Ashe Court at Flushing Meadows as a sweet is as comical as was the original “story”.
She remains forever Maria, however. To many she is saintly. To others less so. She ought to be remembered for her tennis – but even she knew, having accrued more than $200m outside prize money, that her whole story was more than just hitting a tennis ball very hard. With or without help from a Latvian chemist.
