Months after reports of a doping violation first surfaced, 79th-ranked Varvara Lepchenko was declared to bear “no fault or negligence” for her anti-doping rule violation by the International Tennis Federation on Tuesday after having tested positive for meldonium in January at a WTA tournament in Brisbane, Australia.
Meldonium, a heart medication that was a popular supplement among athletes from the former Soviet Union, triggered hundreds of positive tests this year after the World Anti-Doping Agency added it to the prohibited list on January 1.
Lepchenko is the first American athlete, but the third tennis player, revealed to have tested positive for meldonium. Lepchenko, 30, was born in Uzbekistan, but moved to the United States in 2001.
The three tennis players, all of whom tested positive in January, have encountered widely varying timelines and consequences for their tests, complicated by WADA’s lack of prior research into how long meldonium might linger in an athlete’s sample after ingestion.
Maria Sharapova, the highest-profile athlete to test positive for the drug, is appealing a two-year suspension for her positive test, which she announced in a news conference to report her positive test in March. A 33-page ITF report on her case, released in June, said she had admitted taking meldonium after the ban was in effect. Sharapova has said she was not aware the drug had been added to the prohibited list.
Sergey Betov, a Belarussian doubles specialist, was first found to bear no fault or negligence in April, after the low concentration of meldonium in his sample was shown to corroborate his account of having last taken meldonium in October.
Lepchenko’s case remained unresolved for longer because the concentration of meldonium in her first positive sample, 12,360 nanograms per millilitre, was 93 times greater than the concentration in Betov’s sample. According to the report released by the ITF on Tuesday, Lepchenko contended that she stopped taking meldonium around December 20, just 11 days before its ban went into effect.
She tested positive for diminishing amounts of meldonium at three subsequent out-of-competition tests, through April. She was forced to forfeit only the prize money and ranking points gained in Brisbane, the site of her only failed in-competition test. Lepchenko was apparently not tested weeks later at the Australian Open, where Sharapova tested positive for meldonium.
Lepchenko was able to keep the $73,639 and 130 ranking points she earned there for reaching the third round, as well as her earnings at subsequent tournaments in Dubai and Doha.
Lepchenko, like Sharapova, was informed of her positive test in March, and she served an unannounced provisional suspension from the tour until April, when Wada released protocols for how long meldonium could be expected to linger in athletes who stopped taking it before January 1.
Lepchenko returned to competition in Rome the next month. Weeks later, a report surfaced in Russian news media that her father had told a Russian trainer that she had served an unannounced meldonium ban.
The ITF would not confirm this, and Lepchenko refused to confirm or deny anything, even under heavy questioning that peaked in May at the French Open in May, when she said “no comment” eight times in the news conference after a first-round loss.
The farcical scene may have been a catalyst for change. Within days, the ITF president, David Haggerty, expressed openness to amending the rules against announcing provisional bans. In August, the rule officially changed, effective September 1.
The federation explained the decision as one necessary to improve perceptions of its anti-doping program.
“The reputation of the programme and, consequently, the image of tennis, have been damaged by accusations that players have been allowed to serve bans without those bans being made public [so-called ‘silent bans’],” the federation said in a statement last month.
“This rule change will prevent any further similar accusations and so protect our sport,” the federation said.
But such transparency was not yet the norm during Lepchenko’s case. During her second-round victory over 15th-seeded Timea Bacsinszky at the US Open this month, a commentator for the tournament’s world feed spent much of the match rehashing the allegations and uncertainty around Lepchenko.
Lepchenko again declined to discuss her case after that match, but she did discuss the meldonium cases around the Russian swimmer Yulia Efimova, as well as Sharapova’s, whose appeal will be ruled on by the international Court of Arbitration for Sport in the first week of October.
“Obviously, I feel really, really bad for her, because she didn’t check the rules and it happened to her,” Lepchenko said of Sharapova. “I don’t know what they’re going to come up with in the appeal. Again, this medication they were saying was like an aspirin, and then the next year it became it illegal, and all the sudden you’re a cheater or a bad person.”
