At this year's Australian Open, five-time Grand Slam champion Maria Sharpova announced that she had tested positive for meldonium, a recently banned performance-enhancing drug. The positive test was taken on January 26th, the day that Sharapova lost to Serena Williams in the quarterfinals. Meldonium is a drug that was originally created in Latvia to aid blood flow for heart patients, and is still not licensed for distribution in the United States. It was officially banned at the end of 2015.

But Sharapova, the highest-paid female athlete in the world, is not alone in taking the substance. Last week, the Russian national hockey team traded out their whole roster before flying to the USA for the World Cup. The media reported that the use of meldonium may have been the reason. Russian swimmer Yuliya Yefimova and volleyball player Alexander Markin also used the drug. According to official reports meldonium has been detected in over 30 Russian athletes. Over 100 athletes have already beeb found to be using the drug. 

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Abeba Aregawi, a Swedish runner who won the 1500-meter at the 2013 world championships, has tested positive; so has the ice dancer Ekaterina Bobrova, who tested positive at the European Figure Skating Championships. Sharapova however has stated that she was not aware that meldonium had been placed on the World Anti-Doping Agency's banned list at the time that the test was taken in January. Her family doctor, she asserts, prescribed it to her because, "I was getting sick very often. I had a deficiency in magnesium. I had irregular EKG results, and I had a family history of diabetes and there were signs of diabetes." However Dr. Steven Nissen (chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic) has publicly stated, "There is no way [this drug] would be clinically indicated in a healthy young athlete."

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Guilt aside, Sharapova's commercial fallout was near instantaneous. Sharapova has her own clothing line with Nike (NKE  ), which has been one of Sharapova's most enduring sponsors; the company announced that it was suspending its ties to her as long as the doping investigation continues. That suspension alone could cost her up to $70 million; and or a first-time drug offense, an athlete can be barred from competing for two to four years, depending on whether the drug use was unintentional or intentional, respectively. Yet Sharapova is banking on any sanctions being relatively lenient, given the low dose she had been taking and the drug's recent transition from being only monitored to being outright banned. In the meantime, Nike is not the only company that has distanced itself from Shrapova. Porsche (ETR: VOW3) has also postponed all sponsorship with her; the Swedish watch company TAG Heuer has likewise withdrawn from renegotiating a sponsorship agreement that ended in December of 2015.

It is always big news when a star athlete is caught "doping", and Sharapova is a star among stars. Similar media storms gathered around Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, and Lance Armstrong. However, the consequences of being caught doping-assuming that an athlete is ever caught-often come too little to late for such stars. Their millions have been made. Conversely, the shadow of being accused of using performance-enhancing drugs sticks to an athlete for the whole of his or her career, putting any subsequent achievements under intense scrutiny. Thus even if Sharapova is cleared to compete again, she will likely find that her reputation as an tennis player-and her viability as an endorsable athlete-will never fully recover.