Swedish player Mikael Ymer has made a second statement in relation to the 18-month ban he received for violating anti-doping regulations.
On the 18th of July Ymer announced he had been suspended for missing three out-of-competition drug tests in a 12-month period. He had initially been cleared by an independent tribunal in June 2022, but the International Tennis Federation (ITF) appealed that decision and Ymer was subsequently found guilty despite fighting the third charge relating to his whereabouts failures.
Ymer has now put on record his experience with the third incident that he felt, in particular, was unfair and not his fault. He states he travelled to a Challenger event in Roanne, France, and thought he had been booked into the main hotel but had actually been moved to a secondary hotel that was an eight-minute drive from the main hotel. However, the following morning a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) arrived at the main hotel to test Ymer. The current #51 in the world says he always makes between 06:00-07:00 his time for availability for testing, but he only received a call at 06:55 which he thought was a spam call, and Ymer felt it would not have mattered if he answered in any case as it was too late for him to get from the secondary hotel to the main one.
Ymer feels aggrieved for three reasons. Firstly, the WADA handler only contacted him five minutes before the end of his allotted time. The handler claimed this was protocol, but Ymer states his attorney gave evidence proving that the handler went out of his way to find a missing player at a different event. Secondly, Ymer asserts that IT technicians proved that no confirmation e-mail about the hotel change had been sent to his agent, and thus he had no reason to change Ymer’s whereabouts status.
Thirdly Ymer argues that the ITF has singled him out unfairly. He said the following in a part of his statement on twitter: “The ITF is supposed to be a protector of our sport and its participants should only reluctantly ban one of their players from being able to compete. I would think they would be happy to learn that an independent tribunal had decided there was no reason to move forward with a ban. I get tested constantly, but you never know when they decide to show up. Clearly the test have come back negative without any issues every time.”
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