MELBOURNE, Jan 15 - Tennis chiefs are considering introducing provisional suspensions for players who fail drug tests to speed up the process in a fresh move in the fight against drug cheats. Currently, once A and B samples have tested positive nothing further happens until after a tribunal hearing, which can take several months. Women's tennis chief Larry Scott said at the Australian Open that provisional suspensions could be introduced as early as next year. "That's the one dramatic step we could take to shorten the process," the chief executive of the WTA Tour said. "The time between the B sample testing positive and the tribunal hearing can be months; what's being discussed is possibly announcing a suspension after a B sample is positive, provisionally, and then it would be confirmed after the tribunal hearing, or not confirmed. "There's a sense that it would certainly speed up when a suspension's announced, and also force the parties, particularly the players and their team, to want to expedite it, as opposed to (there) is a sense that sometimes people aren't in a hurry to expedite it," he told The Age newspaper. "So that's being discussed, but it's not a decision you take lightly, because it does heighten the risk that you announce a player is guilty provisionally and they turn out not to be. "So there's a trade-off between speed and fairness, due process and just the abundance of caution you want to take in dealing with matters that can ruin a player's reputation."
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