Former top-20 participant Varvara Lepchenko has been handed a four-year doping suspension by the Worldwide Tennis Federation after she examined optimistic for a banned stimulant throughout a match final 12 months.
Her lawyer, Howard Jacobs, stated that American Lepchenko intends to attraction the choice to the Courtroom of Arbitration for Sport.
The 35-year-old Uzbekistan-born participant, who has represented the USA within the Olympics and the Billie Jean King Cup, took the doping take a look at after a first-round loss on the Hungarian Grand Prix final July.
She went on to seem in three different tournaments, together with profitable the title at an occasion in Charleston, South Carolina, earlier than being provisionally suspended in August.
The written ruling says Jacobs informed the panel that complement contamination “can’t be utterly eradicated” as a potential reason for his shopper’s optimistic take a look at, however the tribunal decided that Lepchenko didn’t show that her use of the banned substance was unintentional.
The tribune’s four-year punishment was backdated to August 19, 2021, the beginning of Lepchenko’s provisional suspension and he or she’s eligible to return to competitors in August 2025, when she will likely be 39.
This was Lepchenko’s second doping violation, however the Worldwide Tennis Federation stated she is being penalised as if it have been her first.
That is as a result of it was decided she was not at fault within the different case, which concerned testing optimistic in 2016 for meldonium, the guts medicine that led to Maria Sharapova’s doping ban.
Lepchenko moved from Uzbekistan along with her father and sister to Florida. She was granted political asylum, started dwelling in Pennsylvania in 2003, and have become a US citizen in 2011.