TENNIS in DEPTH.

Richard Gasquet has been cleared of doping by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which dismissed appeals by sports authorities for a tougher penalty after the French tennis player tested positive for cocaine in March.

Gasquet, a former top 10 player and a Wimbledon semi-finalist, failed the original test at the Miami Masters.

The 23 year-old said traces of the drug entered his system via a woman – known only as ‘Pamela’ – who he kissed in a Miami club.

International sport’s top court acknowledged that Gasquet was likely to have been inadvertently contaminated with a minute trace of cocaine when he kissed the woman.

“The player has been exonerated from any fault or negligence and the CAS has dismissed the appeals filed by the ITF (International Tennis Federation) and WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency),” the court said in a statement.

Gasquet was provisionally suspended in May before serving a two-and-a-half month retroactive ban.

The ITF and WADA wanted him to be hit with a ban of one or two years.

The Lausanne-based court’s arbitrators said that a doping offence was correctly reported because of the presence of a “minusucle” quantity of cocaine in Gasquet’s urine sample.

However, they upheld Gasquet’s contention that he was contaminated through kissing and concluded that he could not be blamed.

“On a balance of probability, the CAS panel concluded that it was more likely than not that the player’s contamination with cocaine resulted, as Gasquet always asserted, from kissing a woman in a nightclub in Miami on the day before the anti-doping test.

“It was impossible for the player, even when exercising the utmost caution, to know that in kissing a woman who he had met in a totally unsuspicious environment, he could be contaminated with cocaine,” the statement added.

The CAS found that Gasquet “had met the required standards of proof with respect to the way of ingestion.”

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