Double Fault for Tennis

Tennis landed on the front pages and led off television news reports for days in England and Australia early this month, well before the first ball was to be served at the first Grand Slam tournament of the year, the Australian Open.

A promoter’s dream?

Not quite.

Gary Wadler was taking a moment to return a reporter’s phone call last week, between studio sessions with the BBC and Sky TV in New York. You may not be familiar with Wadler and his field of expertise, but he wasn’t on to talk about the weakened women’s field at the Australian Open or how Wimbledon champion Roger Federer might fare in Melbourne without a coach for the first time in years.

Wadler, an associate professor of medicine at New York University, is a drug expert, the lead author of the book “Drugs and the Athletes.” He was in demand because of 1997 U.S. Open finalist Greg Rusedski’s admission last week that he had tested positive for the banned steroid nandrolone.

Rusedski, in a lengthy statement issued by his lawyers Friday, said his sample had borne the same analytical fingerprint as was detected in 46 other samples provided by players on the ATP Tour, asserting, “This story goes back to August 2002 and represents one of the biggest scandals to surface in world sport.”

The ATP responded by saying it could not comment on pending doping investigations regarding its players.

A bit of background: In early July 2003, the ATP, which runs men’s tennis, announced the dismissal of a two-year suspension of Czech player Bohdan Ulihrach. It said that the tour trainers might have inadvertently given out contaminated electrolyte tablets, possibly causing seven players to test positive for nandrolone, including Ulihrach.

That remains a mystery. Rusedski’s statement said the electrolytes in question were analyzed and found to be negative. Also cloudy is the timeline. Rusedski’s positive test occurred well after the others’, on July 23 at Indianapolis last year, after the tour reportedly had tightened its procedures, no longer allowing its trainers to dispense supplements, vitamins or electrolyte products.

The ATP sought assistance from the World Anti-Doping Agency, but Dick Pound, chairman of WADA, had been discouraged by the delays in disclosure and recalled it had been close to withdrawing from the case.

“Either we get the stuff in the next 10 days or we’re going to pull out and tell you we’re not satisfied,” he said during a phone interview Monday. “We’ve got it, and we’ll now start looking at it.”

He said he hoped WADA’s work would be completed by Feb. 9, when Rusedski’s hearing is scheduled in Montreal. The ATP has been slow to accept WADA’s code, though the International Tennis Federation has done so.

“Their major concern is not unlike soccer and cycling; that is, if you get a positive drug case and there are no extenuating circumstances, the sanction would be two years,” Pound said of the ATP.

“The ATP, for some reason, is uncomfortable with that. You would think an association of players would not want any of their members to be cheating and stealing money from other players by having enhanced results.

“Most sports go through a period of denial. They can’t believe it is happening to them. They eventually come around. The problem is, quite often, they’ve waited so long that the situation has bordered on being out of control.”

Said Wadler: “There is a silver lining in this black cloud that seems to be hovering over sports at all levels right now. The reason you’re hearing about it is, the process is uncovering it much more. Getting this stuff out in the sunshine is painful, but terribly therapeutic.”

The pain is building in the locker room.

Rusedski’s strategy of disclosure was criticized by colleague and ATP player council member Todd Woodbridge, who was quoted in the British paper the Guardian as saying, “He would have had better support in the locker room if he hadn’t broken it the way he did.... What he has done is show the players this isn’t the way to go about fighting a drug case, and he has made life very difficult for himself.”

U.S. Open winner Andy Roddick has been in Australia for only a few days and has watched the story dominate the headlines.

“The thing that [bothers me] about it is that it’s taking away from the good stories in the game right now,” he said in a conference call with American reporters Monday.

“It’s like we are building momentum, then something like this comes up. I’m not here to talk about guilt, innocence, this, that, or the other, but it’s disappointing when you are reading the papers here in Australia and that’s what they choose to focus on.”