Tennis Mailbag: The WTA’s Role in Women’s Sports Boom

Where does women’s tennis factor in the growing popularity of women’s sports? Plus, has drug testing evolved, and how has it impacted the sport?

Sabalenka and Gauff are among the WTA's top prize money earners of 2024. / IMAGO / NurPhoto

Submissions have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Hey, everyone …

• Here’s the latest episode of the Served podcast.

• More Served news: We are thrilled to announce that, starting in 2025, we will be partnering with Vox Media. Without getting too sappy and sentimental, none of this happens without our audience and listenership. We appreciate it.

• Here’s a Sports Illustrated tribute to Novak Djokovic and his 2024.

• We are taking the plunge and joining Bluesky, hoping, as the name suggests, the climate is a bit sunnier and the air less polluted: @jonwertheim.

Onward … 

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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 multiple folks at the WTA. 

It basically boils down to this: Why has women’s tennis been largely absent in the conversation about the current women’s sports boom? That is, as more attention/investment/cultural cache and conversational bandwidth has been devoted to the WNBA, Caitlin Clark, the NWSL and NIL deals, why does the WTA not figure more prominently?

This is complicated and doesn’t lend itself to a few paragraphs. But here’s a take: The WTA is the O.G.! If the WTA has been somewhat excluded from the current discussion, maybe it’s because it’s further along the growth curve. It 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 wage. The fight for mainstream media attention? That’s largely over. (More than 20 years ago, the Wimbledon women’s doubles final featuring the Williams sisters outdrew the men’s singles final.) Women’s players making more money in off-court income? Please. Chris Evert was an exemplar of that in the 1970s. Players using their platform for social justice? Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova practically wrote the playbook decades ago.

Inasmuch as the free market is a barometer for success, look at the WTA in 2024. Cailin Clark made roughly $80,000 in her rookie salary. That’s first-round prize money at a major. Nelly Korda won seven (!) LPGA events and pulled in $4.4 million in official earnings for ’24. Coco Gauff won more than that for one week of matches at the WTA Finals. Serena Williams retired with almost $100 million in prize money alone—unadjusted for inflation—and is on her way to becoming a billionaire. 

Even the social and culture war issues that attend women’s sports in 2024? From a tennis perspective, it seems a little been there, done that. The Clark contretemps and the chatter about the old guard ambivalence toward a new star taking their shine? A lot of the same tropes are from a quarter century ago when the Williams sisters broke through, despite the chilly reception from the Irina Spîrlea types. 

The expansion of opportunity, like the WNBA’s growth from 12 to 16 teams (still half the NBA’s total)? Since 1987, all major draws have featured 128 players. The flow of corporate dollars? Venus Williams had a $40 million Reebok deal in 2000, the same year the WTA had a title sponsor, Anna Kournikova had more branding than a NASCAR roadster and New York Magazine had cover stories like this. Again, this was a quarter century ago.

This is not to discount or dismiss the premise here. It would be nice if Aryna Sabalenka, Gauff, Świątek and the WTA were wormed deeper into the current conversation and celebration of women’s sports. If there were louder trumpeting of the 52 (!!) players on the WTA Tour, as of this week, who made north of $1 million in 2024. If Tennis Ventures got more credit. If, still, more corporate dollars were sloshing around women’s tennis and media rights fees were higher yet.

But I would submit that, in some ways, the WTA’s muted presence in the current discussion is a validation. Women’s tennis was ahead of this wave, not drowned by it.

The Williams sisters shaped tennis and women's sports for decades, critical in achieving equal pay and helping grow the sport's popularity. / Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

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Did you rank GOAT [forehand] in men's tennis just randomly or in terms of greatness?? No way Sampras's FH should be ahead of Federer. But what about Lendl's FH?? He should be in the top 5. In WTA anybody other than Steffi as #1 is unacceptable.

@rajuSaha

• I’ll stick with Roger Federer ahead of Pete Sampras, with an assist to racket and string technology. You’re right on Ivan Lendl. He needs to make a top-five list. (And an underrated one-hander too, no?)

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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'm going to submit my own pick for fifth: Igor Andreev and his Forehand Bludgeon of Death.

Scott

• Nice, I remember that whip! Others receiving votes: Taylor Dent, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Jack Sock and Nick Kyrgios. Djokovic probably belongs, too. 

As for women, as promised …

1)  Steffi Graf

2) Serena Williams

3) Monica Seles’s smack

4) Madison Keys

5) The immaculate technique of Lindsay Davenport

Who are we missing?

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One of the most provocative things you've ever written is of your encounter with a former player who basically accused a top American woman of PED/steroid use. This was, I believe, during the early 2000s, but no one matching that description was ever fined or suspended. Still, it's likely that players of that generation ingested trace amounts of banned substances, too, so why have the number of doping cases seem to have spiked in recent years? Has drug testing just gotten better or more detailed in the decades since? Has there been a proliferation of banned substances?

Jason

• I’m not sure I recall that story but I will try and find it. I was telling a friend that when I first covered doping, the thinking was that this was a game of whack-a-mole and the bad guys were ahead of the good guys. That is, the science of the cheaters was outpacing the science of the detectors. Remember “the clear,” the topical that Barry Bonds used? The entire premise was that it was not ingested into the body so one wouldn’t fail a urine drug test. Lance Armstrong, you’ll recall, never failed a drug test. He was busted largely on anecdotal and nonanalytic evidence. Athletes were using masking agents and EPO and transfusion and getting 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 to doping technology and science, but it has outpaced it. Edwin Moses explained to me recently: “When we first started, they said, ‘You can pour a gallon of a steroid in a pool and we can detect it.’ Then it became a tablespoon. Now, it’s one drop. We can detect one drop in an Olympic-sized pool!”

In the case of Świątek, the amount of the banned substance was so minuscule that there is no way it could have enhanced performance. Never mind a drop; per her team, it was equivalent to a grain of sand in a swimming pool. But the testing is sufficiently advanced that it triggered a positive test. 

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Świątek tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned substance, ahead of the Cincinnati Open and accepted a one-month suspension. / Geoff Burke-Imagn Images

Jon,

If I could add one more issue to your list, H? I? J? It was a long list (but that was good!). I’d say another complicating factor is that it seems like ALL the positive tests turn out to be accidents (or “accidents”). Just as you say Świątek wouldn’t risk her career to take an infinitesimal amount of TMZ, wouldn’t SOMEONE take the risk? How is it that there are seemingly NO dopers in tennis? Isn’t that suspicious (or “suss” as my daughters would say)? You’ve knocked the tennis anti-doping protocols before. Maybe they’re SO bad that they don’t catch anyone. Maybe if the positive tests are suss, maybe the negative ones are as well. 

Maybe I’m overthinking it but as I’ve mentioned, I grew up a baseball fan in the steroid era and a cycling fan in the Armstrong era. But at least those sports made an effort to address the problem. Tennis fiddles while Rome (and all the other Masters 1000s) burn (see what I did there?).

Finally, sorry Świątek made me so mad that I neglected to mention good luck to Indiana U in football.

P.R.

• I’d much rather be talking about Indiana football. 

But you raised a good point. Seldom does an athlete say, Busted. You caught me. I did the crime; I’ll do the time. Guilty as charged. What’s my penalty? Armstrong not only strenuously denied cheating but filed lawsuits against whistleblowers he knew were telling the truth, an act of almost unfathomable moral bankruptcy. Marion Jones lied under oath. A cyclist’s positive test owed to a vanishing twin. A tennis player took a banned substance to combat a family history of diabetes, never mind that she started a candy line with “sugar” in its name. It’s easy to see how fans—and, maybe more critically, tribunals—grow skeptical and treat every explanation as dog-ate-my-homework nonsense.

It’s naive to say that any sport is 100% clean. This runs counter to what we know about incentives and rational behavior. By the same token, if we accept that rational behavior is a driving force, we also need to accept when it cuts against PED use. Świątek tested negative at the Olympics and the U.S. Open, two of the biggest events on her calendar. She is worth tens of millions of dollars. She is introverted and averse to conflict at the best of times. She is 23 and still has so much runway ahead of her. If, between the Olympics and the U.S. Open she intentionally sought to cheat—by taking a vanishingly small amount of an angina drug in Cincinnati—it would not only be an act lacking in morals, it would be an act wildly inconsistent with rational behavior.

SHOTS

• Buy my friend Peter’s book on R.E.M.

• The NCAA announced that it has approved a bid to award the USTA National Campus in Orlando the NCAA Division I men’s and women’s tennis championships for 10 years beginning in 2028.

• International Tennis Hall of Fame inductees Kim Clijsters and Martina Hingis will play a three-set singles match on Saturday, Feb. 1, in the Dallas Open’s annual Women’s Tennis Classic presented by Baker Tilly.

• Here’s another event heavily promoted at MSG.

• Two of the ATP’s highest-ranked South American stars have committed to play the Tour’s only North American clay court tournament in 2025. Argentina’s Tomás Martin Etcheverry and Chile’s Alejandro Tabilo will take part in next year’s Fayez Sarofim & Co. U.S. Men’s Clay Court Championship. American Tommy Paul is also set to participate.

• Italy will host the Davis Cup Final 8 from 2025 to ’27, the International Tennis Federation has announced.