Yanina Wickmayer’s Suspension Leaves Me Cold

I was already feeling a little drugged-out this week, with all the talk of Andre Agassi’s crystal meth exploits and Tim Lincecum being caught with a bag of weed while driving his Mercedes on an Oregon Freeway.

Perhaps you were too?

But those stories, while controversial, and perhaps symptoms of a larger issue (the issue being that recreational drugs are eating at the very core of our once moral and virtuous society – okay, at least it was more moral and more virtuous, right?), didn’t produce the same effect as the very harsh 1-year suspension that was handed down to Belgian 20-year-old Yanina Wickmayer.

In violating the ITF’s ultra-rigid “whereabouts rule” three times, Wickmayer has found herself in very real and exasperating situation that should have been avoided.

I am not here to bash the ITF, who enforces the policies of WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency), for they are merely standing firmly by the guidelines set forth and made available to all the players. Nor am I here to bash Wickmayer, who has captivated me with her energetic brand of tennis in rising from World No. 67 to World No. 16 in less than a year.

And maybe that is the true problem here, the true grist of my anger and frustration with all of this. It is unclear who is to blame, and it is unclear as to whether Wickmayer is an innocent being unnecessarily led off into tennis purgatory or a sneaky doper who tried to skirt the ITF’s rigid drug policy, but failed.

It is, unfortunately, one of those questions that will forever remain unanswered.

And it isn’t the only question that will remain unanswered. Here are a few more:

Why wasn’t Wickmayer given proper warning by the ITF regarding her whereabouts infractions before things had gotten to this point? In other words, is there ongoing communication taking place between player and governing body, or is there a detached sort of bureaucratic animosity that lends itself to these kind of unnecessary violations? I ask this question because Wickmayer is a young girl. She’s barely turned 20. If you’ve leafed through the copious and perhaps senselessly rigid instructions of the whereabouts policy, like I have, you can probably imagine a similar scenario existing for yourself.

Which brings me to my next question: What the hell was coach and father, Marc Wickmayer, doing during all this? Again, I don’t know the whole story, and as I mentioned earlier I probably never will, but isn’t it safe to assume that the coach and father would be making sure that his daughter didn’t accidentally commit a doping violation?

Wickmayer has expressed surprise at the suspension, and that is was not until June that she learned that her whereabouts were out of order. Since then, she says, she has gotten her act together.

According to Tennis Week’s Richard Pagliaro, a communication breakdown between Wickmayer and the ITF seems to be at the heart of the matter, just as I suspected.
Of course, there is a part of me that says everyone else complied, so why couldn’t she? I’ve heard Wickmayer’s claim that she was having password problems, but the real problem here seems to be a lack of communication between coach/father and the ITF.

So in the end, the sport loses a fiery competitor who seemed destined to make a run at the top 10 and maybe higher next year. Now it looks like she is destined for a grey period full of bad press, accusations, and the frustration of having to watch Grand Slam championships on TV – knowing full well that she should be competing in them.

I love the idea of the sport of tennis being clean, but I hate the idea of it becoming so stubborn in its mission that it takes down innocent bystanders with stray bullets made of righteousness.

Is that where we’re at now?

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The most exasperating news from tennis this past week came courtesy of the WTA, and involved the suspension of Belgium’s rising new star, Yanina Wickmayer. Don’t you just hate it when one of the better feel-good stories of the year turns out to be…hhmmm, how to phrase this gently – something of a corker coming into the stretch?

We all remember 20-year-old Yanina Wickmayer’s fabulous run into the semis at the Open, losing to the eventual finalist Caroline Wozniacki, then she kept up the good play into the fall. Her lifestory was a great one: the loss of the mother early on, her dad giving up all to coach his daughter; their gamble to move to America and hope that Yanina could prove herself as a player.

She has indeed, but how on earth do you miss – not one scheduled testing – but three? Even if you’re out trekking in Nepal or shelling out big bucks for a rocket trip into space, you still need to meet your obligations as a player. And even if the life of a young player is one of the more far-flung lives available these days, you still have to show up and let the nice people jab you with a needle. Or hand you the urine cup. Whatever.

Was there a reason Yanina missed all three? I’m sure she has a few excuses lined up. But the implication is that funny stuff was going on, that she may have ingested something that would skew a lab test, so she took a hike instead. I would wager that nearly everyone who heard the news reacted as I did: that something fishy may have been going on. In fact, the first words out of my mouth were: “Oh my, she’s got the Michael Rasmussen disease.”

Michael Rasmussen was the Danish cyclist who in 2007 was on his way to nearly certain victory in the Tour de France when his team suspended him. Why? Because they found out Rasmussen had lied about his whereabouts when he missed a drug test. He had told his team he was in Mexico, when in fact someone recognized him training in Europe. Combined with several other testing sessions Rasmussen had missed, his team decided they had had enough. Goodbye Mr. Rasmussen. The CAS, to whom he appealed his two-year ban, weighed in back in January of this year that Rasmussen’s sentence was deserved.

Tennis still would have a long way to go before it could even approach the level of shenanigans that have gone on in the world of cycling. But we can probably all concur that tennis has its own little shenanigans too. One of them – Andre Agassi’s recent confession to meth use – was on display last night on “Sixty Minutes,” wherein Andre was interviewed.

When Andre’s story broke, my initial reaction was: “Oh, so that means Magnus Norman was right on the money after all.” Norman, the Swedish player who rose to Number Two in the world, released his biography a few years ago and he levelled the charge about Agassi there. He caught some grief for basically saying that Agassi had tested positive and the ATP looked the other way. Magnus must be feeling something like vindication this week.

Wickmayer is now going to catch some grief as well, a full year’s worth of it. Her compatriot, Xavier Malisse, also from Belgium, was suspended at the same time. I don’t know what Xavier’s story entails, but for Wickmayer it was the three missed dates. Assuming for the moment that maybe it was, in fact, an innocent mistake, albeit x3, then we need to look to her father. After all he is her coach/manager/advisor, and you have to wonder why and how he let this come to pass. If you can uproot your lives in Europe and gamble all on making a success in America, then surely he has the wherewithal to get his daughter to the lab on time. And she should be able to do it anyway under her own steam. The excuse Wickmayer offered up was that she had difficulty logging onto the WADA site to update her movements, as all players are required to do. Some players, Serena Williams among them, have complained about how difficult it is to always pinpoint your movements, but surely a player can plan a schedule well enough that they make at least one appearance. Wickmayer could not even do that.

So now I am looking at this tall and rangy player, whom I was starting to enjoy so much, and I am wondering how she got to be so tall and rangy. I don’t want to believe she got that way by doing things I’d rather not hear about. But we have to entertain the thought that maybe she did. Her game was lovely to look at and promising. Now we’re not going to be seeing it for at least a year. For a rising player, that could be an eternity, I only hope Yanina survives it and learns a few valuable lessons. But what a shame.

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