Australian Open 2018: French star Alize Cornet facing two-year ban for missing three anti-doping tests

FRENCH TENNIS star Alize Cornet is facing a two-year ban after missing three doping tests.

World No 42 Cornet has complained that the tennis authorities “didn’t want to hear” her “valuable reasons” for breaching whereabouts rules three times in 12 months.

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But if Cornet cannot convince a disciplinary panel she had a legitimate excuse for missing at least one of the tests, the maximum penalty would be a two-year suspension.

It’s the third major anti-doping scandal to hit women’s tennis in the last two years, following bans for five-time Grand Slam champion Maria Sharapova and former top 10 star Sara Errani, of Italy.

International Tennis Federation regulations say players must submit, every three months, details of where they will be every day and specify an hour-long time-slot between 5am and 11pm when they will be available for out-of-competition testing.

Cornet said in a statement: “Last October, I got a third ‘no-show’ from the Anti-Doping Agency and the ITF, which means among the 20 anti doping controls that I had in the 2017 season, which were all negative of course, I missed 3 unannounced controls at home because of valuable reasons that the ITF didn’t want to hear”.

AP

Cornet, who went on to accuse the authorities of treating players like “robots”, will keep playing until her hearing in March.

But ITF rules mean have forced France to drop her from the squad for next month’s Fed Cup tie against Belgium. Cornet lost to Belgium’s Elise Mertens in the third round of the Aussie Open last week.

It will be interesting to see how much sympathy, if any, Cornet receives from the tennis world.

Sharapova was given a 15-month suspension after testing positive at the Australian Open in 2016 for meldonium, a drug she had taken for years but which had been placed on the banned list at the start of that year.

Errani served a two-month ban last year after cancer drug letrozole was found in her system. Errani convinced an anti-doping disciplinary panel that a family meal of tortellini and broth had been accidentally contaminated by her mother’s medication.