Marketa Vondrousova has been taking a break since January. The former Wimbledon winner could face consequences.
Former Wimbledon champion Marketa Vondrousova could face consequences after refusing a doping test last December. As the 26-year-old Czech made public on Instagram, she had denied a doping control officer access to her Prague apartment out of fear after months of physical and mental difficulties. Vondrousova could face a four-year ban.
Vondrousova went on to describe how she found it stressful that someone she didn’t know “asked to enter my living room without identifying themselves”. She referred to a case involving her compatriot Petra Kvitova, who suffered a career-threatening hand injury in 2016 when she opened the door to a stranger armed with a knife.
2023 Wimbledon winner has been on hiatus since January
Vondrousova said she had been struggling with “persistent sleep problems that made me exhausted and unstable”. Vondrousova’s lawyer Jan Exner told AFP that “the doping control simply did not meet the usual standards and Marketa therefore had a reason not to give the sample”.
Vondrousova, who had surprisingly triumphed at Wimbledon in 2023 as an unseeded player, had canceled her participation in the Australian Open in January due to a shoulder injury and has been on hiatus since then. Now she will take more time “to breathe and recover”, wrote the world number 46.
