Dan Evans' career under threat after positive cocaine test

The build-up to Wimbledon was overshadowed by scandal on Friday night after Dan Evans, the British No. 3, 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, the very future of his career must stand 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 No. 1 Andrew Castle. “A massive mistake.”

John Lloyd, who had been Evans’s 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 on Friday afternoon. 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.

“This is a very difficult day for me,” said Evans. “It is really important that you know this was taken out of competition and the context completely unrelated to tennis. I made a mistake and I must face up to it.

“I do not condone for one second to anyone that this was acceptable behaviour. I have let a lot of people down – my family, my coach, my team, sponsors, British tennis and my fans. I can only deeply apologise from the bottom of my heart. It is a sad and humbling experience.”

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’s 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 called Pamela.

Evans’s provisional ban will start on Monday, 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 back at regular intervals, usually because of a questionable attitude. In 2008, he was caught nightclubbing into the early hours on the eve of a junior doubles match at Wimbledon.  

If the British game had a stock price, it would be falling through the floor, after recent setbacks on the court and now this devastating revelation.

“We are very disappointed,” said the LTA’s performance director Simon Timson in a statement. “We absolutely condemn any form of drug-taking and will support the process which needs to take place.  We are in touch with Dan and we will offer appropriate guidance, support and education to him on how best to address the issues he now faces.”

Evans should still have time to rebuild his career, but he is about to miss out on what should have been his prime years in the game. Tennis will have moved on by the time he returns to the match court. If, indeed, he returns at all.

The news is all the more depressing because Evans had staged a dramatic career renaissance in the last two years, climbing from No. 772 in the world in April 2015 to his current position on the edge of the world’s top 50. In January, he beat the former US Open champion Marin Cilic on his way to the fourth round of the Australian Open – his deepest run at a grand slam.

On the court, Evans is a gifted strokeplayer and a natural entertainer. Off it, he is a provocative character who contradicts the stuffy “strawberries and cream” stereotype of British tennis. The game will be the poorer for his absence, but he has no-one to blame but himself.

Evans deleted his social media accounts before coming in to make his announcement, and the immediate outcry showed that this, at least, was a wise decision. His name will be forever tarnished by his offence.