Indian tennis player Parikshit Somani banned for 4 years due to doping, Aubameyang undergoes surgery, and Murray and Nadal face off after a decade

Indian tennis player Parikshit Somani was banned for four years in a doping case on Wednesday, after judges rejected the explanation he provided, which was similar to the one put forward in the case of Russian figure skater Kamila Valeeva.

The result of a sample examination of Somani (26 years old), who reached the peak of his career to rank 256 in the world, in doubles competitions, was positive for the presence of the substance “trimetazidine”, during his participation in a lower-category tournament held last year in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Trimetazidine, a heart medication on the list of banned substances, is the same substance that has appeared in other famous cases, such as the Valeeva case, which sparked widespread controversy during the 2022 Beijing Olympics, and the case of the Chinese swimmer, the star Sun Yang, in 2014.

The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) announced that an independent arbitration panel decided to ban Somani until September 2029.

The agency stated that Somani justified the positive result of the examination by the occurrence of food contamination resulting from food prepared by a member of his family, as residues of a medication that that individual was taking were transferred to the food that the player ate. This explanation was similar to what was presented by lawyers for Valeeva, who was also sentenced to a four-year ban.

The International Tennis Integrity Agency explained that Somani's defense team was unable to prove the source of the alleged contamination during a hearing held in August.

The agency added that the arbitration panel judges concluded that the food contamination hypotheses were “scientifically unreasonable,” “based on pure speculation,” and “unconvincing.”

y Gabonese striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is undergoing surgery on his right knee on Thursday to treat pain in the meniscus, according to what his Spanish football club Deportivo La Coruña reported on Wednesday.

The club explained in a statement that Aubameyang will undergo the operation in the capital, Madrid, after feeling pain in his lateral meniscus during the 1-1 draw against Real Betis in the seventh stage on Sunday.

La Coruña did not specify the duration of the absence of the 37-year-old striker, who will join its ranks this season from French club Marseille. He is the all-time top scorer for the Gabonese national team (86 matches, 40 goals).

La Coruna ranks seventh with 10 points from two wins, 4 draws and a defeat.

In early September, Aubameyang announced his withdrawal from the national team, expressing his feeling of “insult” at being excluded and later reinstated after the team’s disappointing performance in the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco.

Britain's Andy Murray and Spain's Rafael Nadal face off again on the court, a decade after their last match.

Murray was announced as captain of a team that will face a team led by Nadal on October 3, as part of the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Rafael Nadal Academy on the island of Mallorca, according to the British news agency PA Media.

Murray and Nadal met 24 times during their professional careers, with the Spaniard winning 17 of them.

Their last meeting was in the semi-finals of the Madrid Open in 2016, where Murray won in two sets to none, knowing that the duo had retired from playing in 2024.