Kyrgios, 31, was provisionally suspended<\/a> by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) after a sample he provided at the Mallorca Championships on June 22 tested positive for benzoylecgonine, a metabolite of cocaine. The suspension took effect on August 4 and was announced publicly by the ITIA on August 19.<\/p>\n\u201cTo be entirely honest with you, I knew about this before the announcement,\u201d Tsitsipas said. \u201cI knew about all of this before any announcement was made, and when I saw it on social media, I was like, \u2018Here we go.\u2019 I kind of expected it, to be honest.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew that those were things that were happening away from the tennis courts. These were behaviours that I personally heard on the tour and heard other people in that same environment saying those sort of things to me. I am surprised it came so late, though.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nick Kyrgios tests positive for cocaine<\/p>\n
Amelie Claydon<\/p>\n
The pair have a fractious history, most notably from their volatile third-round meeting at Wimbledon in 2022, which Kyrgios won in four sets on his way to reaching the final.<\/p>\n
Tsitsipas hit a ball into the crowd and later twice struck shots towards the Australian, while the eventual Wimbledon finalist repeatedly argued with the chair umpire and demanded that his opponent be defaulted.<\/p>\n
Their dispute continued after the match, when the two-time Grand Slam finalist accused Kyrgios of \u201cconstant bullying\u201d and said he had a \u201cvery evil side\u201d. Kyrgios responded by saying the Greek had \u201cserious issues\u201d.<\/p>\n
The 2022 Australian Open doubles champion acknowledged and apologised for his positive test last month, stating he made a \u201chuge mistake\u201d. He said his struggles with injuries had impacted him mentally, adding that \u201ccoming to terms with being near the end of my career has been harder than I ever imagined\u201d.<\/p>\n
His positive finding was confirmed by a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratory on July 17. Cocaine is prohibited in competition under the Tennis Anti-Doping Programme, and Kyrgios was placed under a mandatory provisional suspension while the case is resolved.<\/p>\n
He has the right to appeal the suspension but had not done so when the ITIA announced the case. While suspended, Kyrgios is barred from playing in, coaching at or attending events sanctioned by professional tennis bodies, Grand Slams or national associations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stefanos Tsitsipas says he knew about Nick Kyrgios\u2019 positive cocaine test before it was publicly announced and was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":756815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-756814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/756815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}