Does tennis have a doping problem?

Is it more remarkable that Romanian two-time Grand Slam tennis champion Simona Halep took performance enhancing drugs, or that she was caught? I ask only because the sport’s authorities seem to catch vanishingly few dopers, which surely means either they’re very bad at it, or elite players rarely cheat to win enormous sums of money.  

Certainly, it’s easy to be cynical about tennis. When in 2017 I interviewed legendary doping chemist Angel ‘Memo’ Hernandez – who during the nineties and 2000s was the world’s leading illicit sports chemist, providing undetectable super-stimulants to a wide range of household name athletes – he burst out laughing when I asked about doping in tennis.  

‘Tennis was paradise for a long time. No testing involved. No testing. They were in paradise, enjoying their stuff, loving their stuff. No testing at all. Now I believe they have started testing, but it is still a joke,’ he said.  

Halep on Monday was banned for four years after a urine sample she gave at last year’s US Open was found to contain Roxadustat, an anti-anaemia drug that just happens to stimulate production of the red blood cells so vital for physical endurance.