In Sharapova ruling, no clear winners

With her doping suspension reduced to 15 months, from two years, Maria Sharapova and her legal team sounded triumphant on Tuesday.

But the truth is that nobody should be pumping a fist and bellowing, "Come on!" when it comes to the Sharapova case. None of the major players ended up winners.

Not the World Anti-Doping Agency, which botched the introduction of meldonium to its banned list this year, undermining faith in the system at a moment when faith is imperative.

Not Sharapova, who made errors in judgment and will still miss more than a year of competitive tennis and take a major financial hit for what the Court of Arbitration for Sport concluded on Tuesday was essentially an administrative oversight.

Certainly not the International Tennis Federation (ITF), which again had a tribunal overruled by the sports court in an important case, in this instance even being taken to task by the court.

"They keep getting flipped," the American sports lawyer Paul Greene said, using the industry term for "overturned."

Yes, they do. See, for a start, the cases of the prominent men's players Marin Cilic and Viktor Troicki in 2013, when Cilic's ban was reduced to four months, from nine, and Troicki's to a year, from 18 months.

It appears to be time for yet another under-duress look at change, which has become the rule in tennis throughout this year of upheaval.

An independent commission is already at work scrutinising the sport's integrity amid concerns about match fixing, particularly at the lower levels of the game.

There are still legitimate concerns about the depth and effectiveness of tennis's antidoping program even though there has been an increase in out-of-competition testing along with the welcome - if overdue - decision to make the system more transparent by announcing positive tests publicly before adjudication.

ESPN reported Tuesday that in a confidential survey it had conducted with 31 professional tennis players this year, 65 percent of the respondents said that the sport still did not test enough and that they personally knew a player who had used performance-enhancing drugs.

There are even bigger concerns about all the stars who might have slipped through the big cracks when oversight was considerably weaker. If tennis is not testing stored samples from years and Grand Slam events past - the ITF will not confirm or deny this - it most certainly should be.

If and when the smoke finally clears, this all may prove to have been worth the trouble. But the tumult of this year has been painful and, in Sharapova's case, maddeningly avoidable.

Sharapova, who said she had taken meldonium under the brand name Mildronate for 10 years to help with a variety of health problems, should have known that there had been a change to the banned list. But as the sports court made clear in its ruling, antidoping authorities and tennis authorities should have done a better job of letting players know that a long-permissible drug was now off limits.

"I think we have an obligation to look at how we are advising and educating our athletes to make sure that we're doing everything we can and that this doesn't ever happen again to another athlete," Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. "Because nothing positive comes from a positive test."

That is debatable, of course. Positive tests are both a deterrent and a reassurance. Tennis, relative to other global and elite sports, has still caught too few major players to instill full confidence. The positive in Sharapova's case is that there will now be a more vigourous effort to spread the antidoping news.

© 2016 The New York Times