(Reuters) – Former Wimbledon junior runner-up Nikola Bartunkova has been given the green light to return to action on the WTA Tour after she accepted a six-month doping ban for unwittingly ingesting a banned substance in a contaminated supplement.
The 18-year-old Czech, who reached the Wimbledon girls’ singles final last year, tested positive for trimetazidine, a hormone and metabolic modulator in February and March.
The International Tennis Integrity Agency said in a statement on Thursday: “The ITIA accepted that the positive tests for trimetazidine were caused by the contamination of a supplement containing milk thistle extract, that the violation was not intentional, and that the player bore no significant fault or negligence.”
Bartunkova was provisionally suspended in April after reaching a career-high ranking of 226.
ITIA added that the teenager’s results between the first positive test in February and the start of her suspension in April have been disqualified, with the exception of a first-round result at the W75 event held in Ricany, Czechia in March as she had returned a negative sample at that event.
The player accepted this sanction.
Bartunkova has been free to play since Monday.
(Reporting by Julien Pretot; editing by Pritha Sarkar)
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