Reduced ban delights eager to return Sharapova

Former world number one Maria Sharapova says she is ‘counting the days’ until she can return to tennis.

The five-time grand slam winner received a major boost on Tuesday with news that her two-year ban from the sport has been reduced to 15 months on appeal.

It means the 29-year-old will be back in action next April, in time for the second grand slam of 2017, the French Open in Paris.

A Court of Arbitration for Sport hearing found that while Sharapova bore some degree of fault for a positive meldonium test, it did not merit the two-year sentence imposed by the International Tennis Federation.

Sharapova tested positive at the Australian Open in Melbourne earlier this year, less than four weeks after meldonium was added to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s list of prohibited substances.

The Russian had been a long-term user of the drug and argued she was guilty of nothing more than an oversight.

The CAS ruling upheld her plea but found she “bore some degree of fault” and upheld a ban of 15 months, cutting nine months off the initial ban.

Sharapova says she cannot wait to return to the game that she loves.

“I feel like something I love was taken away from me and it will feel really good to have it back.

Tennis is my passion and I have missed it. I am counting the days until I can return to the court,” she said in a statement.

“I have taken responsibility from the very beginning for not knowing that the over-the-counter supplement I had been taking for the last ten years was no longer allowed.

But I also learned how much better other Federations were at notifying their athletes of the rule change.” She urged the International Tennis Federation to also heed lessons from the incident.