Maria Sharapova - Unstoppable

Where was I in the winter of 2015? Not physically, but mentally? I guess I was in retrospection, thinking about the past. I had begun this book. I was imagining my retirement; subconsciously, I was probably planning it. I was thinking about my life after the game. I would play through the winter and spring, appear at the Olympics in Rio that summer, then begin my last professional season. Maybe one more turn around the circuit, with this book appearing on shelves a few weeks before the 2017 U.S. Open. That was the idea. I’d tell my story and take my bow and say goodbye. I remember sitting with Max in a hotel room and talking about my thirtieth birthday. I told him I wanted to celebrate it like a normal person and not be in some locker room in Stuttgart when it came around. We talked about a party. We talked about this and that. In other words, I was full of plans. And you know how the saying goes: Man plans, God laughs.

The year 2016 began, as the year always does, with me in Melbourne for the Australian Open. I got through the early rounds, only to meet a familiar fate. Serena Williams beat me in the quarterfinals, 6–4, 6–1. It felt like a decent start to my twelfth professional season. But, as sometimes happens in nightmares, what felt like the beginning turned out to be the end.

A few weeks after the Australian Open, when I was back in Los Angeles, training and rehabbing my left wrist, practicing and preparing for the American hard court tournaments, I got a funny-looking e-mail. It was from the ITF, the International Tennis Federation, the body that governs our sport. The messages I get from the ITF tend to be in the nature of mass e-mails, announcements with attachments, the sort of e-mail that is hardly alarming. But this one was different. It was addressed to me and to me alone. I clicked on it and read it, and as I read it my heart started to pound. It said that the urine sample I had given in Australia had been flagged and tested and had come back positive. In other words, and I had to read this again and again to make sure I was not hallucinating, I had failed the drug test. What? How? I’d always been very careful to treat my body right and to follow the rules. I searched for the name of the drug. What the hell could it be? I took nothing that was new, nothing that was not legal and prescribed by a doctor. There it was at the bottom of the note. It was called meldonium. OK, obviously this was a mistake, I told myself, relieved. Who had ever heard of that? I copied the word from the note and pasted it into the Google bar and hit search, just to make sure.

Then I understood. I knew meldonium as Mildronate, the brand name. It was a supplement. I’d been taking it for ten years, as had millions of other Eastern Europeans. Mildronate is an over-the-counter supplement in Russia. You don’t even need a prescription. You just grab it off the pharmacy shelf. In Russia, people take it the way people take baby aspirin in America: for a heart condition, for coronary artery disease. It is used by people with any sort of heart issue. It’s so common that you don’t think of it as a drug, let alone a performance-enhancing drug. I’d first been told to take it when I was eighteen years old and I was getting sick a lot and having an issue with irregular heartbeats and abnormal EKGs. A cardiologist told me to take Mildronate as a precaution during high-intensity training and matches, along with vitamins and minerals. I was not unfamiliar with the supplement, because my grandmother also takes it for her heart condition.

For seven years I had written confirmation from a WADA-accredited lab that all the supplements I was taking, including Mildronate, were permissible. In fact, I think the system I had in place for checking new supplements was better than the system used by just about any other athlete out there. I was careful—extremely careful—but I got too comfortable with the idea that the supplements I’d been taking would stay legal.

WADA—the World Anti-Doping Authority, which sets the policy followed by the ITF—grew concerned about meldonium not because it improves performance but because it was being taken by so many athletes from Eastern Europe and Russia. WADA’s thought process seemed to go something like this: if so many hundreds of athletes are taking it, they must think it gives them an edge.

At first, WADA put meldonium on a watch list. Then, as of January 2016, it was banned. How were we informed? Meldonium was included in a catalog of banned substances that the ITF sent out to players. It was viewable by clicking through a series of links in an e-mail. I never followed those links, and didn’t ask any member of my team to. That was my mistake. I was careless. But the ITF didn’t draw any attention to the fact that they were suddenly banning a supplement that was being legally used by millions of people. That was their mistake.

An issue that could have been easily resolved became a crisis instead. I felt blindsided by the ITF’s poor notifications, trapped, tricked. The whole thing seemed like a misunderstanding. I figured all I had to do was explain myself and it would be fixed. I mean, meldonium had been banned for what? Four weeks? So, at worst, I had inadvertently been in violation of the ban for less than twenty-eight days, along with hundreds of other athletes. And this coming after twelve years on the professional tour. It should’ve been easy to clear up. But I soon realized that I was running into a brick wall. First, I’d have a hearing before a panel selected by the ITF. If I failed to win my case at that hearing, I could be banned from the game for up to four years. Four years! It would be the end of my career, the end of everything. All that I had worked for and built would be washed away, just like that. And for what? An honest mistake.

The news had not yet hit the press, and I did not know how or when it would. That scared me. I stayed strong on the outside, just hoping this would all get resolved quickly, but on the inside every cell of me was crying. Then I thought. And thought some more. Then I rallied. I asked myself, “Why just wait for the news to break? Why not go out and explain to the world exactly what happened? If I tell the truth, nothing can hurt me. If I tell the truth, everyone will understand and this nightmare will be over.”

I called a press conference less than a week after I got that e-mail. I wrote a statement, then got ready. I had told no one but my parents, Sven, and Max. There were few people I could talk to. I did not tell anyone else because I did not want the news to leak. I wanted to be the one to tell it, at my own time, in my own way. It was the only thing I could still control. I was relieved that I’d finally be able to tell the members of my team, my friends and the people I worked with, what was going on. As much as anything else, this week had been isolating and lonely. Who did I tell before everyone else? My friend who also happens to be a hairstylist. I called him a few hours before I went in front of the cameras for the press conference, and asked him to come over with his gear. When I explained what was going on, he said, “You mean, all this time, we could have been doing really great drugs, and this is what you chose? Honey, next time you need to ask my advice before you go pharmaceutical shopping.”

It was the first real laugh I’d had in days. I could not tell marijuana from cocaine. Or anything from anything. That’s what made the whole thing so bitterly ironic. They always nail you for the things you don’t do, for being the person you are not. The people who really do the drugs—my guess is they know how to protect themselves, so they don’t get caught. My test flagged red because I took the pills and went in for the sample without thinking. I’d been taking those pills for years, they’d tested me for years, without any problem because they were completely legal, so why all of a sudden should I go about my routine differently? It’s like if they suddenly changed the speed limit from 55 to 35 but did not post the change. It would be no problem for the speeders—they’ve got radar detectors or whatever to beat the cops. It’s the rest of us who go 55, believing we are well within the limits, who get nailed.