Maria Sharapova banned from tennis for two years over drugs

An independent tribunal just handed tennis star Maria Sharapova a two-year ban from the sport for testing positive for meldonium, a substance that Sharapova has been taking for a decade but wasn’t added to the WADA’s list of banned substances until last year.

Sharapova’s defense was that she was prescribed meldonium in 2005 for legitimate health reasons, and only went on taking it after it was put on the banned substances list because she didn’t pay close enough attention to the updated list. The tribunal didn’t buy that argument, determining that Sharapova went out of her way to keep her meldonium intake secret—she stopped seeing the doctor who prescribed it to her in 2013, and failed to tell her newer doctors that she was still taking the drug—and only used it because of the physical advantages it offered.