Wimbledon 2023: Banned players

It's been ages since I've written about tennis, nearly a year. But over the past year or so I have been busy setting up and videoing my exercise routines that I did from an early age and continued into my tennis career and current fitness regime. Here's a photo from my fitness video I posted today on Instagram:


Fitness Wellness Instagram

Fitness Wellness Facebook

I have continued to be interested in and  following what's been going on in both the women's and men's tours. Djokovic is finally allowed to play the full tour which is something he should have been allowed to do anyway, every year. That's the good news. 

The bad news is the ATP and WTA should never have hounded Wimbledon for taking a stand against the invasion of the Ukraine last year and forcing them to reverse it this year. I don't think their unfair action against Wimbledon was necessary under Tour anti-discrimination rules and has simply resulted in depriving lower ranked ITF players of money for their tournaments. 😑 And possibly led to Wimbledon having to take sponsorship offers from a company that has a bad track record on oil. 

Nadal has been injured and Halep has had a dreadful time of it! It's totally unbelievable what a mess they've made of her case. Had Halep been on the ATP she could have continued to play until such time that her hearing took place and only then would she have been suspended, or not. But not so on the WTA - the female players are suspended on mere suspicion of even very low levels of a listed substance present in their test results. Whether they are innocent or not doesn't come into it because they are suspended before proven guilty that they have done something intentionally, rather than just being the victim of cross contamination. It seems to me that they make the tour harder for women tennis players. Surely the WTA should be thinking the best of her, suspending judgement and standing by her supporting her through the whole process to make it less daunting and confusing and to lower the psychological and emotional impact and stress levels on her. But then the women's tour is run by men so it's not surprising they don't! Not sure why, when the WTA was set up by Billie Jean King who is still actively involved and the face of the Tour. I will never understand why the top jobs go to men when it's a women's tour. And then people go on about women spaces and trans women being a problem for women but cis men, no problem. πŸ€”πŸ™„πŸ€·

Anyway, so Halep does the leg work and shows that she didn't take any substance knowingly. The drug test result was due to contamination of a vitamin supplement that was not labelled properly. She checked with her doctor if it was in line with the rules, he answered in the affirmative, because he can only account for what is labelled on the bottle, not for what has been omitted. So Halep thinks she's done everything according to the rules. But no. The tour seems to expect players to be all seeing and all knowing and take responsibility for everything, even when specialists around them get it wrong and misadvise them. And as far as I'm aware, the Tour refuses to check any products for players so they have to figure everything out themselves which is highly unrealistic because it involves complex, technical scientific knowledge. For instance, a product can contain two substances that are not banned, but they can chemically react with each other and create a third substance, which is banned. So that third substance is strictly speaking not an ingredient and so not listed, but it could be present in the eg vitamins as a by-product and so show up in your system and test results. So unless you are a genius in chemistry or pharmaceuticals, you won't be able to figure out what hidden substances could be in the most innocuous products eg vitamins or cold syrups. Which is why, after I looked into all these technicalities when signing onto the tour, I ended up running on worse than empty, because I was trying to avoid invisible ingredients πŸ‘€. However, I was so bottom of the tennis tournament pile, doing 1st and 2nd round 10K and 25K ITF qualifying, nobody bothers with non-ranked players. 

Nevertheless, learning almost too much about the biology, chemistry and tennis tour doping regulations from the age of 20 onwards has been hugely valuable to me, even though I didn't go on to be a grand slam winner πŸ˜₯πŸ†. I think it's a great life skill that everyone should possess, no matter what job they do, so I'd recommend this obscure form of health and nutritional education to everyone, ranging from: checking products; to making healthy choices; to looking out for possible contamination through no fault of your own eg accidental by brands or deliberate by individuals. 

For instance, it even helped me survive my university years later on in my 20's, where drink spiking and other related drug attacks such as spiking by injection are a problem that many female students become a victim of. For a quick overview, see:

Article on spiking by drink or injection

Perhaps if they were equipped with knowledge that athletes need, then there would be less student casualties. Even when you are an athlete, I personally found it is still tricky enough to spot and avoid every health endangering stunt, especially:

1) during my BA Philosophy uni years despite never partying but only attending departmental socials (that included lecturers) I still encountered attempted drink spiking and at another time college admin pressuring me to just generally drink, and act daft by taking my shoes off, what on earth?! - er no!

2) even after graduating, for example, shortly after I left uni (had my degree result and online transcript but not my degree certificate yet) I was just walking in a public arcade when a woman bumped into me deliberately. She aimed straight into my pathway rather than carrying on walking towards the massive, free area next me while I couldn't change direction to avoid her because my mother was walking right next to me on one side and the tall woman was taking up the space on the other side of me, especially since she was not walking slowly or in a straight line. The woman was also carrying a sharp object that I felt against my skin slightly but luckily it didn't pierce my arm! I have no idea what she was carrying but I suspect she didn't have the result she was hoping for. 

So I can imagine that preposterous situations can happen to tennis players that they may find difficult to explain. Suppose she had punctured my skin and some drug was injected into my system and suppose I was playing on the tour then the outrageous situation could occur whereby I have something in my system through no fault of my own. I would be the victim of an attack. But it sounds so ridiculous that the doping agency might not have believed me if some malicious, anonymous person had lied to them pretending that they thought I'd taken a banned substance. As it was I was fine and since I wasn't playing tournaments I wouldn't have a doping problem.

What's my point? Precisely this: preposterous situations do occur and they need not be your fault. So don't make gross assumptions. 

I'm pleased to see it's slightly easier these days because now there are sports products eg protein enriched food sold in mainstream, high street shops that are safe to eat since brands team up with organisations that test the products for us so we only have to look for their logo to know it's been verified for athletes and sportspeople. Nevertheless, this does seriously restrict your options when choosing brands, healthy food products and so on, so I can see why Halep hoped that a doctor could help her understand how to safely expand her options. So much for phrases such as 'consult a medical professional beforehand' and relying on/ trusting doctor's advice! Why does the Tour not take this into consideration, especially since she had such low levels in her body and by and large she was not winning many matches around this test result, so her performance was hardly enhanced! 

So far, Halep has been led a merry dance with hearing dates postponed and no result yet. It makes me wonder whether she'll receive a fair and unbiased hearing after being treated so disrespectfully. It seems so similar to the treatment of Phillip Schofield after he came out as gay. Both Halep and Schofield were adored stars and multimillionaires at the top of their career, winning accolades for years then suddenly, their characters are slandered, and their careers are destroyed over very minor facts, if you look at it objectively. 

Why do people refuse to believe them and their defense even though what they say frankly seems to match the facts? All we have established so far is that Phillip had consensual gay sex with a man in his 20's who was well past the age of consent - there is nothing wrong with this, unless you are so homophobic you think that it should still be illegal to be a gay man. In which case you need to apologize, not Phillip! 

And Halep has established, faster than the doping agencies, that she merely accidentally fell foul of a mislabelled vitamin product and a doctor who was wrong to assure her into thinking it was fine for her to take said vitamin supplement. 

Strictly speaking, the guilty ones are the vitamin company for inaccurate labelling and the doctor who should have known better and admitted he/she wasn't sure. 

And now there's a second separate problem for Halep that of blood variation. I don't see how variations in her blood can be that significant: doping regulations revolve around clear, high doses of a banned substance being present in a player's body, not their biological makeup. Any environmental factor can change the constitution of someone's blood, eg vaccinations, high altitude and so on. 

Meanwhile, sidelined, Halep lost her ranking, is out of match practice and her career suspended in mid-air. The way she's being treated is unacceptable. Let's hope the powers that be get their act together but I don't see that happening when they have come up with yet another another accusation. This time it's changes in her blood over the years as seen in her biological passport. What's a biological passport? Never heard of that! Since when is biology an issue?

A further concern, I think, is whether officially using the concept of an athlete's biological makeup as a basis for an accusation of cheating is a potentially dangerous precedent to create these days, given the horrendous transphobia in sport recently which falsely associates trans women's so-called inherent male biology with automatic intentions of cheating to win in women's sport. This is a false accusation. 

Trans women are not cheating and neither are they winning everything. Tennis has already had a trans woman, RenΓ©e Richards, competing at tournaments and there were less scenes then than now and didn't Navratilova use her as a coach for a while because she might well have thought this would give her an edge since a trans woman may have a different approach to sport and be a better hitting partner than a fellow woman.

We must not force trans women into some third open category. That's segregation. It's reminiscent of the times when black people were barred from main competitions and forced into an alternative, separate tour for blacks away from the main one. πŸ˜₯ It wasn't until 1950 that Althea Gibson was allowed to play on the main tour in the USA at Flushing Meadows. We must learn from racial segregation and not repeat history, simply because it's tweaked to gender/sex segregation instead of race, probably so people don't immediately spot the moral wrongness of it. 


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