For Markéta Vondroušová, the road from her historic 2023 Wimbledon triumph to a four-year ban has proved fateful. The suspension, which stunned the tennis world, followed her refusal to take a doping test. It began in December 2025, when the Czech would not open the door of her Prague flat to a testing officer. She blamed fear and anxiety; the tribunal was unmoved. The door stayed shut.
The independent tribunal ruled there was no compelling justification for refusing the test. Vondroušová had spoken of a threat to her safety, yet the International Tennis Integrity Agency, which polices the sport, pointed to her own actions: barely ten minutes after speaking to the officer, she headed out to walk her dog. "Unpredictable testing is an essential tool to protect clean sport," the agency said. With that, it drew a line under the career of a player who won Wimbledon as an unseeded outsider in 2023, reached the French Open final in 2019 and took Olympic silver in Tokyo.
