Maria Sharapova has been cleared of intentionally cheating by an International Tennis Federation tribunal, but she and her advisers hardly have emerged unscathed.
For a tennis champion long viewed as detail oriented, from the cut of her tennis outfits to the breadth of her business portfolio, there was a whole lot of bumbling going on behind the scenes in one crucial area.
The system she and her agent, Max Eisenbud, used to track changes in antidoping regulations was not much of a system at all. It was dependent on Sharapova opening (or not) and reading (or not) the right email.