Ex­World No. 4 Claims He Fought Against Dopers

Performance enhancing drugs have been in the spotlight again after former world number four Guy Forget claimed he was beaten by rivals who took drugs.

Three players ­ Ryan Newport from the United States, Bulgarian Dimitar Kutrovsky and Italian Filippo Calorosi ­ are presently suspended from playing tennis for taking performance enhancing drugs and the former world number 4 believes they are not the only men on the circuit guilty of doping. Guy Forget claims he played against players who were doping by saying he has lost matches against guys who beat me with an unfair advantage because they were taking drugs and added that he can look at himself in the mirror knowing that he never took anything.

Forget added he does not feel that sport is clean and tennis is not untouched by this poisonous thing. He, however, added that this is a minority probably, but that is why and the other guys says we should put more money into blood test and controls because we should fight this any way we can.

Australian coach , who has coached and , said our testing program is inadequate and that's why no­one can stand up and speak out; it's gone backwards in recent years. Current world number one recently said the number of blood tests he has undergone has dropped in the last year and remarked he wasn't tested with blood for last six, seven months and it was more regularly in last two, three years ago. Djokovic added he didn't know the reason why they stopped it.

Dr. Stuart Miller, who oversees the ITF's anti­doping program, says we can improve by introducing what is known as the athlete biological passport, which is a blood­based testing program which allows you to establish individual baseline parameters and there is a reasonably good chance that that it will be operational probably towards the end of 2013. Of Forget's complaints, Miller said anti­doping was very different when Forget was playing as there was no such thing as the World Anti­Doping Agency, there was no list of prohibited substances that all the sports signed up to and actually tennis was one of the pioneering sports in introducing anti­doping testing back in Forget's time.

In the late 1980s, the Men's Tennis Council began drug testing with the focus mainly on recreational drugs and the testing was extended to include performance enhancing drugs when the ATP Tour was formed in 1990. Today, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) leads a unified Tennis Anti­Doping Program applying across all tennis events. The ITF is now thinking on the lines of introducing an athlete biological passport (ABP) which allows officials to collect and compare biological data and spot variances that suggest doping.

Meanwhile, four­time winner Maria Sharapova is confident she is competing on a level playing field and remarked she feels tennis is clean for the amount of times that we get tested throughout the year and as random as they are, definitely.