VICTORIA AZARENKA, the world’s top-ranked female tennis player, had to fight more than just her opponent, Li Na of China, in the final match of the Australian Open on January 26th. The spectators in the Rod Laver Arena were so heavily in favour of the Belarusian’s opponent that, early on in the match, there was loud applause every time Ms Azarenka made a mistake—an abandonment of the custom of cheering only good play. The atmosphere of hostility appeared to affect Ms Azarenka, the defending champion, who began the match showing few signs of the dogged spirit that has propelled her to the pinnacle of women’s tennis. After losing the first set, however, Ms Azarenka played more like her usual self, and won an error-strewn contest by 4-6, 6-4, 6-3. What prompted such overt partisanship was an incident two days earlier, during Ms Azarenka’s semi-final against Sloane Stephens, a 19-year-old American. Serving for the match at 5-3 in the second set, Ms Azarenka lost the game after squandering five match points. At the change of ends, she wrapped an ice-stuffed towel around her neck and requested medical assistance. After being assessed by medical staff, she then left the court for treatment, causing a total of nearly 10 minutes’ delay. Upon her return, Ms Azarenka broke Ms Stephens’s serve to win by 6-1, 6-4. Tennis players are allowed to request medical timeouts for non-acute injuries at changes of end, or between sets. Once their injury has been diagnosed, they are then allowed three minutes of treatment. (A player cannot have two timeouts for the same injury during a match.) By contrast, timeouts for “acute” injuries requiring immediate assistance (such as falling during a rally and twisting an ankle, as Li Na did twice during the final) are permitted at any time. Challenged about her timeout immediately after her victory, Ms Azarenka didn’t refer to any injury. But she did mention how nervous she’d felt towards the end of the second set. “I almost did the choke of the year,” she said. “I just felt a little bit overwhelmed. I realised I’m one step away from the final, and nerves got into me, for sure.” Many people understandably interpreted these words as an admission that Ms Azarenka hadn’t actually been injured, and had called the timeout purely for strategic reasons.

In a subsequent press conference, Ms Azarenka claimed that she had misunderstood the question, and that she had requested treatment because an injured rib was causing her back to seize up, making it hard to breathe. It was later revealed that she had also received treatment for an injured knee, accounting for the six minutes she spent being treated off-court. (The rules permit consecutive timeouts to be taken if two separate injuries are diagnosed.)

Ms Azarenka is only the latest in a line of players to be accused of gamesmanship in their use of medical timeouts. Whatever motivated her in this case, it is easy to see why players might be tempted to feign or exaggerate an injury in the hope of gaining an advantage. A player who is tiring can catch up to one with better stamina by securing a few minutes’ breather. Moreover, momentum shifts play an important role in tennis. Surrendering momentum to an opponent, especially towards the end of a set, can be highly demoralising and hard to reverse. When struggling players sense such shifts occurring, a timeout may give them crucial minutes to refocus, while potentially disrupting the ascendant player’s rhythm.

The problem tennis authorities face in preventing such abuse is trying to distinguish feigned injuries from real ones. Every so often, random chance dictates that players will happen to get hurt at a point when a timeout could also provide a strategic advantage. Medical staff, forced to make snap assessments, are unlikely to dispute a player’s claim to be in pain. Nor is it easy to imagine a workable system for retrospectively investigating whether injuries were genuine. The only obvious costs of taking unjustified injury timeouts are reputational: those suspected of bending the rules may lose public support, the respect of fellow professionals, and possibly endorsement opportunities. But given the huge financial rewards from winning top-flight matches, this isn’t necessarily an effective deterrent. If Ms Azerenka did indeed feign her injury, she might feel it was well worth it.

Scrapping on-court medical treatment altogether is not an option. If no system for receiving treatment during matches existed, there would be more retirements, as well as more cases of players carrying on despite genuine injuries. The former would harm tennis as a spectacle, while the latter would likely lead to more long-term lay-offs. A solution needs to be found that allows players to be treated for legitimate problems, while limiting their ability to cause strategically beneficial interruptions.

In the wake of Ms Azarenka’s semifinal Pam Shriver, a retired American player, suggested that timeouts should be limited to game breaks directly before the service games of players claiming they are hurt. Since players usually feel greater pressure serving than receiving, the argument goes, timeouts are more likely to disadvantage the next server, which would discourage players from requesting them on spurious grounds. This might indeed reduce the strategic potential of timeouts slightly, but it falls far short of solving the problem. Players feeling nervous may still feel they have a better chance of holding their serves after a timeout, while a player in a dominant position can lose rhythm and momentum following a delay even when scheduled to receive.

Another proposal is to eliminate timeouts for non-acute injuries, and instead allow players access to unlimited assistance during the normal breaks that occur in matches, at change of ends and between sets. However, timeouts were instituted because sometimes players need treatment for periods longer than the normal breaks. This option risks the same adverse consequences as scrapping on-court medical treatment altogether.

Perhaps the most effective solution would be a point-docking system. If players forfeited just a single point per timeout, that would probably eliminate the temptation to cheat the system, since in tight matches, each point is immensely valuable. The ability to remain fit throughout a match is as just much a skill as having a good backhand. Playing poorly loses you points—so why shouldn’t, in a modest way, getting injured?