Tennis: British ace Dan Evans in cocaine crisis

Dan Evans faces a long ban. Photo / AP

The build-up to Wimbledon was overshadowed by scandal yesterday after Dan Evans, the British No3, confessed that he has tested positive for cocaine.

Evans has a reputation as a rule-breaker, but this offence is on another level. He faces the theoretical maximum of a four-year ban, and will be lucky to get away with anything less than two. At 27, his career must be in doubt.

It is hard to remember a comparable instance in British tennis. It's true that Greg Rusedski tested positive for the steroid nandrolone in 2004, but he later cleared his name after a tribunal ruled that he had ingested the substance inadvertently.

Rusedski offered Evans a vote of support, saying "hopefully he can clean up his life and get help," but other former players were more critical. "He has chucked his career away," said the former British No1 Andrew Castle. "A massive mistake."

John Lloyd, who had been Evans' first Davis Cup captain in 2010, said: "The bottom line is how many chances do you get? He has had so many in his career, got in trouble and then came back. At some stage, it has to change."

In an echo of Maria Sharapova's own drug-related announcement on March 7, Evans called a press conference at a west London hotel.

However, he wasn't as self-assured as the icy Sharapova, who managed a joke about the ugliness of the carpet in the conference room.

Evans arrived in the company of an agent and his girlfriend. After taking a deep breath to compose himself, he just about managed to read out a 90-second statement before fleeing the scene. Questions were not invited.

From a legal perspective, it will be important for Evans to show this was a recreational offence. While he claims to have taken the cocaine out of competition, the positive sample was collected after a match at April's Barcelona Open.

Cocaine features as a banned stimulant on the Wada code, and there have long been stories that players in the 1980s used it on the court, applying the powder to their wristbands and then inhaling it between points.

But these tales have never been substantiated, and the precedents work in Evans' favour. Martina Hingis served only a two-year ban after her own positive test for cocaine in 2007. Richard Gasquet managed to keep the sentence down to one year in 2009, claiming that he had ingested the substance by kissing a woman.

Evans' provisional ban will start on Tuesday, and the next stage will be a hearing convened by the International Tennis Federation, with the possibility of an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport if he wishes.

If this was going to happen to anyone in British tennis, Evans was the man most likely. He is a noted hellraiser whose behaviour has regularly brought him into conflict with the Lawn Tennis Association. His funding has either been withdrawn or cut regularly.