Our sport is clean, says Nadal

PARIS (AFP) –

Spain’s Rafael Nadal serves to Germany’s Daniel Brands during their French Tennis Open first round match at the Roland Garros stadium in Paris, on May 27, 2013. Nadal repeated his belief that tennis is a drug-free sport but urged the sport’s governing bodies on Monday to go public with how many — and how often — drug tests are carried out.

Rafael Nadal repeated his belief that tennis is a drug-free sport but urged the sport’s governing bodies on Monday to go public with how many — and how often — drug tests are carried out.

Just three weeks ago, the seven-time French Open champion blasted the decision by a Spanish judge not to reveal the names of the athletes implicated in the infamous Operation Puerto doping case.

“I find it unfair that the names of the cheats are not given, whether they’re Spanish or not,” said Nadal.

On Monday, the 26-year-old called for testing in tennis to be made more transparent to win over a public made increasingly sceptical by a deluge of doping controversies which peaked with the Lance Armstrong scandal.

“If you make the controls public and everybody can know how many controls that everybody has, then you are not going to have these questions because you will know how many controls we will have. That’s my feeling,” said Nadal.

“So why we cannot make everything clean? Why we cannot make everything public? Then we don’t have to come here and ask if we are overtested or, you know, we are not tested enough.

“That’s my feeling. Tennis is a very clean sport. We don’t have a lot of cases of doping. And we are having a lot of controls.”