Submissions have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Hello everyone…
• Here is the last episode of Served podcast.
• More Served news: We are delighted to announce that from 2025 we will partner with Vox Media. Without getting too moody and sentimental, none of this happens without our audience and listeners. We appreciate it.
• Here is a Sports Illustrated tribute to Novak Djokovic and its 2024.
• We take the plunge and join Bluesky hoping, as its name suggests, that the climate is a little sunnier and the air less polluted: @jonwertheim.
Ahead…
Most of the questions this week were about Iga Świątek and doping. But let’s start with a topic that has come up in questions, on X, formerly Twitter, and in recent conversations I’ve had with several people at the WTA.
It basically boils down to this: Why has women’s tennis been largely absent from discussions about the current boom in women’s sport? That is, while more attention/investment/cultural cache and conversational bandwidth has been devoted to the WNBA, Caitlin Clark, NWSL, and NIL deals, why isn’t the WTA featured more prominently?
It’s complicated and doesn’t lend itself to a few paragraphs. But here’s a point: the WTA is the OG! If the WTA has been somewhat excluded from the current debate, it may be because it lies further down the growth curve. She has already fought – and won – many of these battles.
The fight for equal pay? We take it as an article of faith that the majors will pay players in both draws the same salary. The struggle for mainstream media attention? It’s mostly over. (More than 20 years ago, the Wimbledon women’s doubles final featuring the Williams sisters topped the men’s singles final.) Are players making more money off the court? Please. Chris Evert was an example in the 1970s. Actors using their platform for social justice? Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova practically wrote the manual decades ago.
To the extent that the free market is a barometer of success, look at the WTA in 2024. Cailin Clark was making around $80,000 on her rookie salary. This is the price of the first round in a major tournament. Nelly Korda won seven (!) LPGA events and raked in $4.4 million in official earnings for ’24. Coco Gauff earned more than that for a week of matches during the WTA Finals. Serena Williams retired with nearly $100 million in earnings (not adjusted for inflation) and is on her way to becoming a billionaire.
Even the issues of social and cultural war which will affect women’s sport in 2024? From a tennis perspective, this seems a bit I’ve been there, I’ve done that. Clark’s setbacks and chatter about the old guard’s ambivalence toward a new star taking their shine? Many of these same tropes date from a quarter-century ago, when the Williams sisters made their breakthrough, despite the frosty reception from Irina Spîrlea types.
Expanding opportunities, like the growth of the WNBA from 12 to 16 teams (still half the NBA total)? Since 1987, all major draws have brought together 128 players. The flow of corporate dollars? Venus Williams had a $40 million Reebok contract in 2000, the same year the WTA had a title sponsor, Anna Kournikova had more brand than a NASCAR roadster and New York Review had cover stories like that. Again, this was a quarter of a century ago.
This is not a matter of dismissing or rejecting the premise. It would be nice if Aryna Sabalenka, Gauff, Świątek and the WTA were more involved in the current conversations and celebration of women’s sport. If there was a louder trumpet 52 (!!) players on the WTA circuitthis week, which has earned over $1 million in 2024. If Tennis Ventures got more credit. If, however, companies invested more in women’s tennis and media rights were even higher.
But I would say that, in some ways, the WTA’s quiet presence in the current debate is validating. Women’s tennis was ahead of this wave, without being drowned out by it.
Did you classify GOAT (forehand) in men’s tennis just randomly or in terms of magnitude?? Under no circumstances should Sampras’ FH overtake Federer. But what about Lendl’s FH?? He should be in the top 5. In the WTA, anyone other than Steffi as number 1 is unacceptable.
@rajuSaha
• I will stay with Roger Federer ahead of Pete Sampras, with assistance in racquet and stringing technology. You are right about Ivan Lendl. He has to make a top five list. (And an underrated one-hander too, right?)
I think you nailed your list of forehands, but since you put a ? by (Fernando) González (and since his forehand was as erratic as it was brilliant), I’ll submit my own pick for fifth place: Igor Andreev and his forehand club of death.
Scott
• Well, I remember that whip! Other votes received: Taylor Dent, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Jack Sock and Nick Kyrgios. Djokovic is probably one of them too.
As for the women, as promised…
1) Steffi Graf
2) Serena Williams
3) Monica Seles’ slap
4) Madison Keys
5) Lindsay Davenport’s immaculate technique
Who are we missing?
One of the most provocative things you ever wrote was about your encounter with a former player who was basically accusing a high-profile American woman of PED and steroid use. This was, I believe, the early 2000s, but no one matching that description has ever been fined or suspended. However, it is likely that players of this generation also ingested trace amounts of banned substances. So why does the number of doping cases seem to have increased in recent years? Has drug testing gotten better or more detailed in the intervening decades? Has there been a proliferation of banned substances?
Jason
• I’m not sure I remember this story, but I’ll try to find it. I was telling a friend that when I first talked about doping, I thought it was a game of whack-a-mole and that the bad guys were ahead of the good guys. In other words, the science of cheaters surpassed that of detectors. Remember “the clear”, the current topic that Barry Bonds used? The premise was that it was not ingested into the body so that one could not fail a urine drug test. Lance Armstrong, you will recall, never failed a drug test. He was arrested largely based on anecdotal, not analytical, evidence. Athletes used masking agents, EPO and transfusions and obtained Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs) for testosterone and human growth hormone.
Today? It’s a different dynamic. I would argue that testing technology has not only caught up with the technology and science of doping, but has even surpassed it. Edwin Moses explained to me recently: “When we started, they said, ‘You can pour a gallon of steroid into a swimming pool and we can detect it.’ » Then it became a tablespoon. Now it’s a drop. We can detect a drop in an Olympic swimming pool!
In Świątek’s case, the amount of banned substance was so minimal that it could not improve performance in any way. It doesn’t matter a drop; according to his team, this was the equivalent of a grain of sand in a swimming pool. But testing is far enough along to trigger a positive test.
Jon,
If I could add one more problem to your listH? I? I? The list was long (but it was good!). I would say another complicating factor is that it seems like ALL positive tests turn out to be accidents (or “accidents”). Just like you say Świątek wouldn’t risk his career to take an infinitesimal amount of TMZ, wouldn’t ANYONE take the risk? How come there are apparently NO dopers in tennis? Isn’t that suspicious (or “suss” as my daughters would say)? You have already violated tennis anti-doping protocols. Maybe they’re so bad they don’t catch anyone. Maybe if the positive tests are good, maybe the negative ones are too.
Maybe I’m overthinking this, but as I mentioned, I grew up a baseball fan in the steroid era and a cycling fan in the Armstrong era. But at least these sports have made an effort to solve the problem. Tennis fiddles while Rome (and all the other Masters 1000s) burn (see what I did there?).
Anyway, sorry, Świątek made me so angry that I neglected to mention good luck to Indiana U in football.
RP
• I would much rather talk about Indiana football.
But you raise a good point. It is rare for an athlete to say: Broken. You caught me. I committed the crime; I will do the time. Guilty as charged. What is my penalty? Armstrong not only vigorously denied cheating, but filed a lawsuit against whistleblowers he knew were telling the truth, an almost unfathomable act of moral bankruptcy. Marion Jones lied under oath. A cyclist’s positive test because of a missing twin. A tennis player took a banned substance to combat a family history of diabetes, not to mention launched a line of candy with the word “sugar” in its name. It’s easy to see how fans – and perhaps more critically, the courts – become skeptical and treat every explanation as nonsense of my duties.
It’s naive to say that any sport is 100% clean. This goes against what we know about incentives and rational behavior. Likewise, if we accept that rational behavior is a driving force, we must also accept that it opposes the use of PEDs. Świątek tested negative at the Olympics and the US Open, two of the biggest events on her calendar. She’s worth tens of millions of dollars. She is introverted and conflict averse at the best of times. She is 23 years old and still has a long way to go. If, between the Olympics and the US Open, she intentionally sought to cheat – by taking a tiny amount of an angina medication in Cincinnati – it would not only be a morally lacking act, it would be a an act totally incompatible with rational behavior.