Maria Sharapova’s stage-managed mea culpa in California Salon 2 at the LA Hotel – a drably carpeted establishment in downtown Los Angeles, she observed with a nervous half-chuckle – has edged tennis closer to the edge of credibility as a refuge from corruption.

Maria Sharapova under pressure over meldonium use as sponsors flee Read more

Her admission that she had failed a drug test at this year’s Australian Open wasn’t quite in the class of Tiger Woods’s 2010 confession of serial philandering, one of the clumsiest attempts to deliberately confuse guilt and innocence seen outside the precincts of a courtroom. But she ran him close.

This is what celebrity athletes do, as administrators who ought to be taking a lead watch from the wings, fingers crossed. They whistle up a press conference and go into full-control mode in the interest of saving their own backsides and the credibility of the sport that has made them insanely rich.

Golf got over Tiger, partly because Nike, which had funded him to mega-wealth since 1996, stood by him – and three years later extended his contract until 2018. Tennis, in time, will get over Maria – who has been instantly marginalised by the same shoe-maker. Work that one out.

Nevertheless, the shock that must have creased the faces of the game’s wretched administrators when the news came through would have been priceless to behold. How they respond over the next couple of months will prove or disprove their mettle, and at this juncture a rather important question needs to be asked: how on earth did the International Tennis Federation, the game’s supposed guardian, allow Sharapova to step in front of it and reveal she failed her test?

Maria Sharapova’s mea culpa forces sport to ask tough questions of its own Read more

The ITF knew what was coming, because it was privy to the failed test and braced for the inevitable fallout. Yet its president, David Haggerty, chose – or was advised – to say nothing when he attended the Davis Cup tie between Great Britain and Japan in Birminghamover the weekend. What we were left with was an overwhelming sense of glacial insouciance. The ITF must also explain to the thousands of clean professionals how it has let this problem drift to the point where all of them are under suspicion.

Sharapova is likely to escape with punishment similar to that imposed on Marin Cilic, who also pleaded ignorance when caught out in 2013, and was back on court within four months. There is the complicating issue of appearances, however. Cilic, fine player though he has been, is no Sharapova in terms of profile or commercial reach.

Steve Simon, who has recently taken over the helm at the Women’s Tennis Association, rushed in line with the apology industry building up in Sharapova’s cause when he called her “a woman of great integrity”, adding the get-out clause, “nevertheless, as Maria acknowledged, it is every player’s responsibility to know what they put in their body”. He needs to be reminded: it is every sports administrator’s responsibility, also, to be transparent, vigilant and pro-active.

Whatever the depth of her culpability, Sharapova rightly shoulders the blame. However, she is the most astute image-shaper in sport bar none, seducing swathes of tame tennis writers to plug her sweets, charming hosts with just a hint of a smile, disarming critics with a pursed-lip frostiness of which Madonna would be proud. Her performance at the LA Hotel (could they not have had it at the Hotel California, such a lovely place?) would have worked as a humble-brag acceptance speech at the Oscars up the road at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood a week earlier. It’s a wonder she didn’t get a round of applause.

There are more than a couple of tennis writers whose judgment of Sharapova’s tennis is warped by their fascination with her Russian aloofness.

Yet she has bursts of candour, such as that in Los Angeles on Monday, and in 2013, when she dragged her feud with Serena Williams, and their rivalry over Grigor Dimitrov, into the glaring spotlight at a memorable Wimbledon press conference. This, however, is not mere tittle-tattle or tabloid fodder about romance. This is about cheating, still the killer word in sport, despite one revelation after another over decades de-sensitising our dudgeon.

What is meldonium and why did Maria Sharapova take it? Read more

Like everyone on the Tour, Sharapova will have heard locker-room whispers of skulduggery, real or imagined. And certainly she must have been aware of these startling statistics: of 4,316 Russian athletes drug-tested last year, 724, or 17%, had the then-legal meldonium in their system; among non-Russian athletes, only 182 of 8,230 of those tested, or 2.2%, had used it.

They surely weren’t all worried about heart conditions or, as Sharapova claimed, a family history of diabetes. Did none of this ring any alarm bells for her – or, more pertinently, how did the vast IMG management machine at the disposal of the most bankable player in the history of women’s tennis, a star who still averages earnings of $30m a year despite only three appearances in the past eight months, not alert her to the danger?

An email landed at Sharapova Towers on 22 December advising her meldonium would be upgraded to the prohibited list on 1 January 2016. Yet nobody clicked on the attachment that proved to be the time-bomb that finally exploded. Sharapova is the boss, and perhaps that is the problem.

Powerful celebrities with big personalities tend not to attract independently minded staff. They nod a lot. They get paid well. They share some of the lifestyle. They are gatekeepers of her image. Except this time they would appear to have let her down to the detriment of all concerned, most importantly the game she says she has “loved deeply” since the age of four. It will take more than another orchestrated “major announcement” to fix this little problem.