News came Tuesday afternoon that Maria Sharapova, the winner of five major tournaments in her long career, would not be offered one of two possible wild cards into the French Open, a tournament she has won twice. She was denied a wild card into the hundred-and-twenty-eight-woman main draw of the event, and she was denied a wild-card entry into the qualifying rounds, which begin in Paris, at Roland Garros, next week. Sharapova needed a wild card to play the French Open because her current ranking is not in the top two hundred, the cutoff to earn an invite to be a qualifier. Her ranking is outside the top two hundred because she has not been earning ranking points, having just returned to the women’s tour at the end of last month after serving a fifteen-month doping ban, which was originally meant to last two years but was reduced on appeal.
Wild-card entry into tournaments—which Sharapova has received for each of the three she’s played since returning to the circuit last month—exists for a number of reasons, one of which is to get a player into a tournament whose low ranking does not actually reflect how well she is playing or has played. Perhaps she has struggled with an injury, and is working her way back into form (though now there is something called “protected ranking” for injured players, of which there are more and more, especially in the women’s game). Or, perhaps she is an aging great who attracts fan or media attention or is well liked.
Maria Sharapova is aging, in tennis terms—she recently turned thirty—and attracts attention, but she is not well liked, at least by a considerable number of her fellow-players on the W.T.A. tour. (She does have 5.7 million Twitter followers, is often mobbed by fans, and is said to have a net worth of a hundred and twenty-five million dollars, thanks in no small part to lucrative global endorsement deals.) Here is Canada’s Eugenie Bouchard, talking to Turkish broadcaster TRT World last month, about Sharapova: “She is a cheater, and so, to me, I don’t think a cheater in any sport should be allowed to play that sport again.” Last week, Bouchard and Sharapova faced each other in a second-round match at the Madrid Open, and Bouchard, who reached the top ten three years ago but had been playing poorly of late and seen her ranking tumble outside the top sixty, beat her 7–5, 2–6, 6–4, in a gruelling match that lasted nearly three hours. The handshake at the net following the final point was arctic, and at her press conference afterward, Bouchard made no attempt to warm things up. “Obviously, there was a lot going on in this match beside tennis itself,” she said. She suggested that her opinion of Sharapova was widely shared in the players’ lounge, and that she, Bouchard, appeared to have gained respect for saying publicly that Sharapova deserves a lifetime ban. “Some girls in the locker room are coming up to me and really wishing me good luck before matches, which doesn’t normally happen to me,” she said.
That doesn’t normally happen to Bouchard because—well, because she is not especially well liked by other players. Here is Romania’s Simona Halep, currently ranked No. 4 and the eventual winner of the Madrid Open, when asked if she approached Bouchard to wish her good luck: “I didn’t wish good luck to Bouchard because we don’t speak, actually.” Then: “She’s different. I can’t judge her for being this. I can’t admire her for being this. I have nothing to say about her person.”
The world learned of Sharapova’s taking a banned, performance-enhancing drug from Sharapova herself, at a press conference that she, along with her lawyers and her publicity team, organized in March of last year at a hotel ballroom in Los Angeles. The goal, clearly, was to frame the narrative. The drug was meldonium, originally developed in Latvia, and used by heart patients throughout the former Soviet bloc to ease chest pains and aid blood flow. It had only recently been banned by the International Tennis Federation, when it became obvious to anti-doping authorities that athletes were using it with a thought to boosting performance. Sharapova’s positive test for meldonium followed a quarter-final match at the Australian Open that she lost to Serena Williams. She hadn’t played since, due to a forearm injury, and, at the lectern in L.A., she worked to avoid the sort of ban that would keep her from playing for a long, long time, and jeopardize contracts with her sponsors.
She’d been taking meldonium for ten years, she explained. “I was getting sick very often,” she said. “I had a deficiency in magnesium. I had irregular EKG results, and I had a family history of diabetes and there were signs of diabetes.”
It was not clear why a woman who had lived in the United States since the age of seven, and who was now the wealthiest female athlete on earth, would not be consulting the best doctors in America if she was worried about heart irregularities and the onset of diabetes. It was not clear how a highly conditioned athlete known for her fierce training regimen might, in her twenties, develop symptoms of diabetes, and what those symptoms were. It was not clear why so many other athletes, in Russia and Eastern Europe in particular—such as the ice dancer Ekaterina Bobrova, for example—were testing positive for meldonium, beginning in 2015, when the drug was placed on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s monitoring list. It was not clear how Sharapova was obtaining meldonium, since it was not approved for sale in the U.S.
“I take full responsibility for it,” Sharapova said, reading from a prepared statement. It was not clear what, exactly, she meant by “it.”
The BNP Paribas Open was under way just then, in Indian Wells, and players there heard the news. Kristina Mladenovic, a French player born to Yugoslavian-émigré parents, who has spent most of her career as a highly ranked doubles specialist, though more recently she has been rising in the singles ranks, spoke about it to the French newspaper Le Parisien. “All of the players are saying she’s a cheater,” Mladenovic said. “She can play with words and find a good lawyer. For me there is no doubt.” Then: “She wasn’t really nice or polite, let’s be honest.”
The day her ban ended, last month, Sharapova returned to the tour as a wild-card entry at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix, in Stuttgart, the first stop of the European clay-court season for women players. It’s a tournament she’s won three times. Porsche happens to be one of her sponsors, though they wavered when her ban was announced by the I.T.F. not long after her press conference in L.A. Clay, in recent years, has been Sharapova’s best surface. She has always been a fighter, who plays every point as though it’s match point, and the slower surface highlights her long-limbed range and masks what, now, after a severe shoulder injury a number of years ago, can be her weakness: the lack of a power serve. She won her first three matches in Stuttgart in straight sets. Then she lost her semifinal match, to Kristina Mladenovic.
Bernard Giudicelli, the president of the French Tennis Federation, announced on Facebook Live that Sharapova would not be granted a wild card into the French Open. He said he tried but failed to reach Sharapova beforehand in Rome. She was preparing for a second-round match later in the afternoon at the Italian Open. Giudicelli, a Corsican who was elected to his post in February, explained that while he could imagine a wild card for someone returning from an injury, there could not be one for a return from doping. Then his statement approached the fulsome. “So,” he declared, “it is up to Maria, day after day, tournament after tournament, to find alone the strength she needs to win the big titles without owing anything to anyone.”
Giudicelli also announced who would receive wild cards. One was granted to Constant Lestienne, a man who is currently ranked No. 253 and who has never won a title on the A.T.P. tour or been ranked higher than a hundred and fifty-fourth. Lestienne was banned last year for seven months, half of it suspended, for placing bets on two hundred and twenty matches, through online accounts. It may or may not be worth noting that Lestienne is French.
Less than an hour after Giudicelli’s announcement, Sharapova, a wild-card entry at the Italian Open, took to the court against the sixteenth-seed Mirjana Lučić-Baroni, of Croatia, in a second-round match. Sharapova dropped the first set, but won the second, and was ahead in the third and deciding set 2–1 when she injured her left thigh and was forced to retire. She did not meet the press after the match, and a statement she released did not mention the French Open.
Lučić-Baroni, for her part, had made her thoughts known on the matter before the match: “Maybe they should give a wild card to Lance Armstrong, too?”