Barbora Zahlavova Strycova banned for six months after drug test failure As the International Tennis Federation did not dispute her explanation, it has limited her penalty to a six-month ban. This seemed even more lenient once it had been backdated to Oct 16, the date of the test. Strycova will thus be free to return to the tour on April 16, although the rankings points and prize money she won at two tournaments earlier this season will be forfeit. Strycova has won one title - the Bell Challenge in Quebec City in 2011 - along with 17 doubles titles in her career. She also plays for the Czech Republic's Fed Cup team and represented the country at the 2004 Athens Olympics. The case has echoes of Shane Warne's positive test for a diuretic pill on the eve of the 2003 World Cup, although Warne was banned for 12 months rather than six. Once you take the off season into account, which runs throughout November and December, Strycova will miss relatively little tennis for her offence. The ITF said that the delay in announcing the ban was the result of due diligence on their investigation. There has been much debate about which drugs present the greatest threat to the integrity of tennis. The majority of experts point to human growth hormone, which helps repair injuries and build muscle bulk quickly, but the World Anti-Doping Agency's director-general, David Howman, said this week that EPO should not be discounted purely because it was associated with endurance athletes. "So many people get off on saying, "This is not going to be good for us,"" he told the Tennis Space website. Marion Jones was using EPO. You can't tell me that a player who is out there for 5½ hours couldn't benefit from a little micro-dosing of EPO.