“You never know what’s behind the next hill,” Marin Cilic says in his intelligent and amused way. “It’s always the unknown and then, when the difficult times roll down the hill, you feel the same. ‘Why do these things happen to me?’ But in the end you understand that when you have some pain the good moments are even better.”
Cilic smiles in philosophical acceptance that his first grand slam victory, at the US Open last September, was made even sweeter by the turmoil of the previous year. Yet there is a stark undertow to Cilic’s memory of how, in his view, deceit and distortion implicated him in a scandal that suggested he had tested positive for nikethamide, an illegal substance, during competition.