Lobbed into tennis’s court

In game theory, there is something called the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’. When applied to athletes it may read thus: players will be better off if nobody takes drugs. But because one cannot trust the other, all of them have to take drugs to have a chance of winning. This was the thought process behind the disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France successes. “If you take me back to 1995, when it was completely and totally pervasive, I’d probably do it again,” said Armstrong early this year.

The possible deterrent to this is the inspection game, the system we have now. An inspector — say, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) — tests the athletes to catch the cheats and to instil the fear of getting caught that should keep the athletes straight. Except that it doesn’t.

As Professor Berno Buechel of the University of Hamburg pointed out in a 2013 paper, “Athletes want to dope without being detected, while the control organisation tries to detect doping without testing clean athletes.” It doesn’t guarantee elimination as the examples of Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees’ baseman, the Russian athletes caught out in the country’s massive doping scandal last year, and now Maria Sharapova prove.

A different protocol

Tennis’s, in particular, is a curious case. Its anti-doping programme is considered too feeble even when compared to the prevalent systems in other sports, which themselves have been shown to be grossly inadequate.

For example, the rules in tennis do not allow for a positive result from a drug test to be announced by the authorities until an investigation is complete. This, as seen recently in the case of Croatia’s Marin Cilic, can lead to silent bans where the player in question pulls out of events citing reasons not even remotely related to doping. Inevitably it results in conspiracy theories of the kind Rafael Nadal has had to battle when it was claimed that his multiple injury breaks, stretching for months, were drug-related.

A Marin Cilic pulling out of events can be fairly innocuous, for back in 2013 he was not even a Grand Slam champion. But Maria Sharapova, five-time Grand Slam champion, world’s highest-paid female athlete for 11 straight years, repeatedly dropping out would have certainly raised enough suspicion. Sharapova’s announcement was probably to avoid that but the way some tennis officials have held her up as an example not of what’s wrong with the sport, but of what’s right with it shows how self-serving much of the discourse has been. Shouldn’t the announcement have come from the authorities instead of the player?

Sharapova has now firmly taken control of the narrative. A huge mistake, she says, and it may well be one, as Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic have acknowledged. But in a system where the sentencing depends on the tribunal’s rather subjective assessment of the degree of intent to cheat on the part of the athletes, these things can have damning consequences. If anything, this might well go on to be a perfect example of a bad law being proved right under mitigating circumstances.

A selective net

For a while now, evidence has been mounting that doping is all-pervasive — across rungs, across sports, across nationalities and across cultures. But tennis has always maintained that it is above such base behaviour. And it has rather curiously — some might say suspiciously — remained controversy-free. A little fish here and a little fish there caught in the net, a flawed net as the sceptics may say.

But Sharapova’s is tennis’s biggest examination till date. Even the match-fixing allegations in early January pale in comparison to this. Tennis should rightfully make an example of her because no system will be considered trustworthy until it nets the big fish. But how is the question.

Professor Buechel and his team in the same paper build on the game-theoretic work by introducing ‘customers’; in this case the fans and the sponsors. “Consider a sports event from which customers turn away their interest,” they write. “This event does not only suffer less ticket and merchandise revenues, it will also become less attractive for media companies who report from the event and for companies who sponsor the event. In sum, this implies a substantial loss for the organisers of the sports event as well as for the athletes.”

Their contention is that these are the reasons why the inspectors may skimp on testing. Detect the bad apple from time to time rather than do the job thoroughly. On the face of it, tennis seems to have done exactly this — forever believing a section of elite athletes are more ethical than others even as avenues to cheat (prize money and endorsement income) soared.

The theory suggested that the only way out was for all tests and their results — negative or not — reported. As we saw above, tennis doesn’t even report the positive until late.

“Establishing transparency is sufficient,” states Professor Buechel. “If customers can observe whether there were serious doping tests, even if they turned out to be negative, then there is a doping-free equilibrium. However, this is not unique. To rule out all doping it would be necessary to change the preferences of the customers (not only their information structure). They should prefer to withdraw their support not only after a doping scandal, but also after the suspicion of doping, i.e. they should insist that strong efforts to detect and punish dopers are made.”

The Tour de France is probably the best example for this. The Economist reported that “nearly two-thirds of the top-ten finishers in cycling’s Tour de France between 1998 and 2013 have faced credible accusations of using performance-enhancing drugs.”

In hindsight, the story of Armstrong seems too good to be true. But the sports fan’s ability to hang on to his or her dreams is beyond imagination. Tennis and other sports cannot afford to wait until their own stories become too good to be true.