Scandal ends hectic decade for Martina Hingis

Two very different Wimbledons. Rewind a decade, and Martina Hingis was celebrated as the Little Swiss Miss of tennis, with the 16-year-old becoming the youngest women's Wimbledon champion of the professional era. Then there was this year's Championships, where she tested positive for something a little stronger than Robinsons Barley Water. Back in 1997, for all her fast-track success, there was an innocence

about her. But, in 2007, it was allegedly found that her bloodstream contained traces of cocaine, a recreational drug which is usually associated with rock stars, louche playboys and supermodels, rather than former racket-swinging prodigies.

A lot had happened in that decade, in between winning over the Wimbledon crowds as a teenager and peeing into a bottle in June this year. A few of the older members of the All England Club probably do not even know what cocaine is. White lines, but a different game.

Hingis last night insisted that she had gone on court at this year's Wimbledon with a love for the game coursing through her veins, not a party drug. Hingis was beaten in the third round of this year's Championships by American Laura Granville.

Tennis has had high-profile drugs scandals before, such as when Greg Rusedski tested positive for nandrolone in 2003 and then cleared his name a year later. Perhaps there is a difference, in the public's perception, between a player's urine sample containing a performance-enhancing drug and a recreational substance. It is all about whether you were trying to cheat your fellow players or not.

But it would be a great shame if, after last night's news of the failed dope test, people forget about some of the wonders she achieved in tennis. In 1997, she won three grand slam titles, starting off with the Australian Open, beating Jana Novotna in that Wimbledon final to have the Czech sobbing on the shoulders of the Duchess of Kent, and then adding the US Open. The French Open was the only grand slam event she did not win that season, but even there she reached the final. Hingis won her fourth and her fifth majors in Australia with victories in 1998 and 1999.

Hingis is not particularly tall for a tennis player, at 5ft 7in, and Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena, once remarked that the her legs were "too short", but that lack of height hardly seemed to matter. It was not power she brought to Wimbledon's Centre Court and elsewhere but class and craft and other clever stuff. It was tennis with an IQ, real Mensa off the strings. However, that lack of height and lack of punch off the racket

became a problem when the Williams sisters became proper forces on the tour. For all her clever-clever style, Hingis was occasionally just overpowered by the baseline sluggers. When she retired in 2002 citing injuries, you felt it wasn't the whole story; Hingis probably believed that she could not dominate any more, and once you have been the little queen of the courts it is difficult for your ego to then take the hit and accept your role as a player on the second tier of the game.

Still, four years later, Hingis surprised the sport by announcing that she was coming back. Clearly, she was bored of studying and riding horses. However, during the second coming, she did not have the impact she would have wanted. No matter that she won two titles last season, in Rome and Calcutta, and scored one tournament win this year as well, in Tokyo. On her return, she never went beyond the quarter-finals of a grand slam tournament.

It has been a traumatic few months for Hingis, as just after Wimbledon it was announced that her engagement to Radek Stepanek, a Czech player, was off. Earlier in the year, she had been seen wearing a massive diamond rock on her engagement ring.

Even before this cocaine scandal, Hingis had had a fairly colourful career. At the 1999 Australian Open, Hingis was embroiled in controversy after she described Frenchwoman Amelie Mauresmo, who had just admitted she was a lesbian, as "half a man". Hingis always had something to say about Anna Kournikova, the Williams sisters and the other top players. But those quotes were nothing next to not only testing positive for cocaine, but testing positive for cocaine at Wimbledon. Hingis protests her innocence.

Officials of the WTA Tour have been accused of being limited and secretive in their fight against drug abuse and have often been described as being well behind the World Anti-Doping Agency's code of practice.

The tour announced during Wimbledon in 2002 that random, no-notice, out-of-competition drug testing was to be introduced following suggestions that the physical condition of top women players at the time provided overwhelming evidence of drug abuse.

An indignant tour spokesman said at the time: "In 2001, several hundred anti-doping tests were carried out on more than 140 different players at various tournaments and we are proud but not surprised by the fact that no anti- doping offences were committed."

Bulgarian teenager Sesil Karatancheva became the first woman to be banned for steroid abuse on the women's tour when she was sentenced at the 2006 Australian Open following a failed test taken after a defeat in the quarter-finals of the French Open seven months earlier. That examination revealed significant levels of nandrolone in her system and she received the maximum two-year ban for a first offence. The 16-year-old was considered lucky to be eligible to rejoin the tour in less than three months' time.

The only other women's player of note to be sanctioned under the WTA's campaign against drug-taking was Russia's Larisa Neiland, who tested positive for caffeine at the 1999 Australian Open. She was 33 at the time and on the verge of retirement but still engaged the sport's governing body in a lengthy appeals process.

--The Telegraph