Meldonium was being widely used in tennis, says Wada’s Dick Pound

The five-times grand slam winner this week revealed that she had tested positive at the Australian Open but Pound suggested that tennis knew many players were taking the drug, which is known to improve endurance and reduce recovery time, before it was added to the banned list in January. “Clearly within tennis circles they were aware that a lot of the players were using it and they said there must be something to this,” he said. “So they refer it to the Wada list committee, which does the research and concludes it should be on the prohibited list, and there it is.”

Sir Craig Reedie, the president of Wada, has warned tennis that his organisation will step in if it believes that the ban Sharapova receives is too lenient. “We always have that right. In most cases we exercise that right when we think there is a really serious case to answer,” he said. “There will clearly be a great deal of interest after the last 48 hours in what the ITF do. My guess is we will watch this one very carefully.”

But a Kremlin spokesman warned that it would be wrong to use the Sharapova case to cast a shadow on Russian sport. “Of course we regret this,” a presidential spokesman, Dmiry Peskov, said. “But the situation should not be presented in such a way that it somehow casts a shadow on all Russian sports, on great achievements of our athletes. Attempts to politicise sports are destructive, unacceptable and inexcusable.”

The extent of meldonium use in sport has been revealed by research in the British Journal of Sports medicine, which suggested that up to 490 athletes may have taken it during the Baku 2015 European Games. It was detected in urine tests on 66 of the 762 samples taken at the Games, and in 15 of the 21 sports in competition.

The agent of the former 1500m world champion Abeba Aregawi said on Wednesday that the Swedish runner’s B sample has confirmed she tested positive for meldonium. Aregawi was suspended last month by her own athletics federation.