World number 84 Nicolas Kicker has been found guilty of match-fixing offences.

Argentine Kicker – who has won 10 singles titles on the ITF Tour – contrived the outcome of two matches at ATP Challenger tournaments in 2015.

Kicker, 25, has also been found guilty of failing to report a “corrupt approach”.

He cannot enter or compete in any professional tennis event as he awaits his sanction, which will be handed to him at a later date.

Kicker achieved a career-high ranking of 78 in June 2017, and reached the third round of the Australian Open in January.

He first committed a match-fixing offence at a tournament in Padova, Italy, in June 2015, before committing a second in Barranquilla, Colombia, three months later.

Three-time champion Serena Williams will play Czech Kristyna Pliskova in the first round of the French Open.

The 36-year-old American is playing her first Grand Slam since giving birth in September and is unseeded.

British number one Johanna Konta faces Kazakhstan’s Yulia Putintseva, while Kyle Edmund – the leading British man as Andy Murray recovers from injury – meets young Australian Alex de Minaur.

Ten-time winner Rafael Nadal opens against Ukraine’s Alexandr Dolgopolov.

• Feature: ‘I won the first French Open prize money, but I couldn’t keep it’

Two other British players are also in the singles draw at Roland Garros – Heather Watson will face France’s Oceane Dodin in the women’s and Cameron Norrie meets Germany’s Peter Gojowczyk in the men’s.

The clay-court tournament – the second Grand Slam of the year – starts in Paris on Sunday.

Serena v Sharapova on the cards?

Former world number one Williams has only played four tour matches since returning to the sport, dropping to 453rd in the rankings as a result.

The 23-time Grand Slam champion is able to play at Roland Garros by using her protected ranking from when she stopped playing before her daughter Alexis was born.

However, there is no protected seeding policy in place on the WTA Tour.

The WTA says it will review the rules – which players including Williams’ rivals Maria Sharapova and current world number one Simona Halep have questioned – before 2019.

But it means Williams will face Pliskova, ranked 70th in the world.

The American could then meet long-time rival Sharapova, who is seeded at a Slam for the first time since returning from a 15-month doping ban, or sixth seed Karolina Pliskova, the former world number one and sister of Kristyna, in the fourth round.

Sharapova, who won the title in 2012 and 2014, and Karolina Pliskova both begin their campaigns against qualifiers.

• Live scores, schedule and results

Who do the Britons face?

Konta, 27, has never won a match in the Roland Garros main draw and the 22nd seed hopes to end that unwanted record against world number 93 Putintseva.

The British number one has beaten Putintseva in both of their meetings – and both came on clay.

British number two Watson has reached the second round on five occasions – without progressing any further – and comes into the tournament having ended a dismal run of eight straight defeats with a win in Lyon this week.

The 26-year-old plays the tall Dodin, ranked 60 places below Watson at 133rd, for the first time.

Edmund, 23, goes into his first Slam as the British number one on the back of a fabulous year that has seen him rise to 17th in the world.

He has to get past 19-year-old wildcard De Minaur, who has risen rapidly up the ranks to 106th over the past year but was just short of automatic qualification at Roland Garros.

Norrie, 22, has climbed to the verge of the top 100 to earn his place in the Roland Garros draw for the first time and is rewarded with a meeting against Gojowczyk.

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Britain’s Cameron Norrie claimed the biggest win of his career with victory over world number 10 John Isner in the quarter-finals of the Lyon Open.

Norrie, 22, ranked 102 in the world, overcame the second seed 7-6 (7-1) 6-4 to reach his first ATP Tour semi-final.

He will play Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Kukushkin or Frenchman Gilles Simon in the clay-court event’s last four.

“I’m so stoked with my performance today,” said Norrie after his first win against a top 10 opponent.

“In the past, I haven’t been so good at playing guys with big serves.

“I remember watching Isner when I was younger. He was a big idol of mine. It’s crazy to be competing against guys like that now.”

• Norrie hungry for more after rapid rise

Norrie had never played a professional match on red clay until he featured in the Davis Cup in February.

His display in that match against Spain saw him secure a victory over Roberto Bautista Agut and prompted former Great Britain captain John Lloyd to call it “one of the most impressive debuts of all time”.

Since then the left-hander has improved his world ranking and he will now move into the world’s top 100 at an expected 85.

Norrie is yet to drop a set at the event, where top seed Dominic Thiem is the only seed left in the draw.

The Austrian plays his quarter-final against Spaniard Guillermo Garcia Lopez on Thursday afternoon.

Analysis

BBC tennis correspondent Russell Fuller

For a couple of months now, Norrie has been hovering just outside the door to the world’s top 100. This week, he has opened it and burst through.

What was so impressive about this win is that he saved all four break points he faced, and converted the one and only opportunity Isner afforded him. When the 6ft 10ins American is your opponent, you don’t know when the next chance may arise.

Norrie only left Texas Christian University a year ago – suggesting he may return one day to complete his final year – and has had a remarkable start to his professional career.

He reached the second round of last year’s US Open as a qualifier, and won his first ATP title when he partnered Kyle Edmund in the doubles in Estoril earlier this month.

Great Britain’s Gabriella Taylor has failed to qualify for the French Open after defeat by Mariana Duque-Marino.

The 20-year-old beat China’s Lu Jingjing in round one of qualifying but fell to a 6-4 6-4 defeat in round two.

Taylor, the world number 184, gave up 27 unforced errors, six more than Colombia’s Duque-Marino.

World number 113 Duque-Marino next faces Slovenia’s Dalila Jakupovic for a place in the women’s singles, which begin at Roland Garros on 27 May.

When Nancy Richey won the 1968 French Open, she never got the prize money, could not ring her parents for the entire tournament and had to change hotels three times in Paris.

The American’s victory over Briton Ann Jones in the final should have earned her 5,000 francs (£422 – the equivalent of about £7,000 today) – the first time prize money was offered at a Grand Slam event – but because she, like most of her compatriots, was still an amateur, she could not accept it.

Instead, she received her $27 (£11 at the time) daily allowance – several weeks later.

“It was really unbelievable,” Richey told BBC Sport. “It disgusts me… [Americans] didn’t get to play for the prize money in the first year.”

She is the only amateur winner of a Grand Slam women’s singles title since the start of the Open era – and is likely to remain so.

But the 75-year-old is not bitter and here describes how being an amateur had its advantages and how the strikes that paralysed France in May 1968 may have helped her win the title.

And she also explains why she forgave her mum for answering one piece of fan mail.

Amateur v professional era

Having been unable to claim the money in Paris, a few weeks later Richey reached the final at Queen’s, which was then a men’s and women’s tournament. Both singles finals were cancelled through rain and she was given a £250 shopping voucher.

“I would have put it in the bank, if I’d got actual money, but this was a voucher I had to get something with – I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it so I went to [London department store] Liberty’s and picked out a set of china and had it shipped home,” she said.

“They didn’t call it prize money – I couldn’t receive it. I guess we’d call it semi-prize money.”

She says she has used the fruit-patterned dining set twice.

Richey did eventually turn pro and was a member of the pioneering ‘Original 9’ – players who broke away from the tennis establishment in 1970 and formed their own professional tennis circuit, which eventually led to the formation of the WTA Tour.

But before that she lived off the $27-a-day allowance she was given by her governing body, the USLTA.

“You could pay your hotel – not a great place – and your food. You scrimped and you got by,” she said.

“You didn’t make anything but it did pay for it. I was fortunate that my mum and dad didn’t push me out – until I got married in 1970, I lived at home. It’s a lot different to what happens today.”

Richey believes one of the main reasons she won the French Open was because she was in much better shape physically than some of her rivals who had just turned professional, including compatriot and 12-time Grand Slam singles champion Billie Jean King.

“They were travelling, playing one-night things, I don’t know if they even played full matches,” she said. “They weren’t able to really train or play like I was playing, and were not in as good a shape as I was in.

“I beat Billie Jean in the semis – the conditioning had a lot to do with it.”

Pioneers of women’s tennis

Like all Grand Slam events these days, the French Open offers equal prize money for men and women, with singles champions this year set to take home 2.2m euros (£1.92m).

But it may never have happened without Richey and the rest of the ‘Original 9’, who risked suspension or expulsion by the tennis authorities when they set up their circuit, partly in protest at the disparity between men’s and women’s prize money.

They all signed $1 contracts and within the next year more than 40 players were playing for over $300,000 in prize money. In 1973, their Virginia Slims Circuit became the Women’s Tennis Association, which still runs women’s tennis today.

“The ‘Original 9’ really started pro tennis for the women. I’m more than thrilled that we were the ones who got it to start. It was a special time,” Richey said.

But does she wish she could have been a player on today’s Tour, reaping the full benefit of the huge prizes on offer?

“No,” she said. “At my stature – five foot three – I don’t think there’s any way I could compete with the six-footers who are playing today.

“I’m more than thrilled that we were the ones who got it to start. I’m happy – what we did was to get women’s tennis where they were playing for lots of prize money.”

And as the graphic below shows, if Richey had been allowed to accept her prize in 1968 she would have been able to buy 10% of an average-priced house in Britain, while this year’s winner could buy more than eight of them.

‘It was like the dark ages’ – Paris in May 1968

France was in the grip of civil unrest while the French Open was being played in 1968, and some players could not even get to Paris which led to many first-round walkovers.

Some of those who did make it to the French capital had been forced to be creative in their travel plans, including Richey’s brother Cliff, who flew to Luxembourg and paid $100 for a 180-mile taxi ride to Paris with a couple of other players.

And once they were there, the impact of the demonstrations and general strikes was significant.

“As the weeks progressed the tournament kept asking us to move closer to the courts because the gasoline was running out in the official cars,” said Richey. “I moved hotel three times.

“It was getting worse by the day after we got in there. The phones weren’t working to call out of the country, garbage was piled sky high everywhere. And then right after I won, the strike broke and I could call home and tell my dad and mum that I had won the tournament. Amazing.

“It was like the dark ages. Not to be able to talk to my father, who was my coach for all my playing days, it was off the wall. It was the oddest tournament I ever played in.”

Nevertheless, she would not change anything. In fact, she would go as far as to say the strikes had helped her because her brother could not get out of Paris and ended up staying on to coach her through the rest of the tournament.

“I’m really thankful for the strikes because I’m not sure Cliff would have stayed and he was as good in coaching as my dad was, so it was really a key thing to me winning the tournament,” she said. “I have to hand him half the trophy at least because he really helped.”

Fan mail and groupies, 1960s-style

Tennis players today have millions of followers on social media, who can pore over every ‘like’, emoji and selfie of their idols.

But in Richey’s day, if you wanted to try to engage with your favourite player it had to be pen and paper.

She never replied to any of her fan mail but then her mum responded to a British girl called Mary in 1966.

“When I got home from Australia my mum was standing at the door,” Richey recalled. “She says you’re going to kill me – and Mary had written back so now it was my responsibility to write to Mary.

“Well, she’s now my best friend.”

Mary and one of her friends travelled to Paris to follow Richey’s journey to the French Open title – no mean feat amid the transport strikes.

“Those were my groupies,” she laughed. “They had a hotel eight miles from Roland Garros – they walked to the courts and back for two or three days during the tournament to watch me play. To walk eight miles to the court and back – 16 miles, I can’t even conceive of it.”

Tennis today ‘a little bit boring’

Richey has not played tennis for around 18 years after breaking her foot. These days she keeps fit with daily three-to-four-mile walks around a local park.

Perhaps a hangover from her playing days, she keeps a meticulous record of the number of miles she has clocked: “I’ve done 310 miles since 1 January.”

She still watches a bit of tennis – but does not always enjoy it.

“The game today is ‘boom, boom, boom – and boom’ – there’s no diversity in style, there’s no serve and volley. A lot of times it gets a little boring to watch,” she said.

But she will be tuning in to see whose name will appear on the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen 50 years after her own.

“I really would like to see [Simona] Halep win, simply because she has come so close so many times. She’s kind of faded away in the key areas there so maybe she can get it together,” she said. “And [Petra] Kvitova looks like she’s having a good year.”