Doping control in French

The fifth entry is le contrôle manqué, and the participle at the end of it is a word English already owns, which is exactly where the trouble starts. « Manqué » came into English from French and kept one narrow job. It follows its noun, it is said of people, and it declares that somebody never became the thing named: « a poet manqué », « an artist manqué », « a diplomat manqué ». The judgement is on a whole life. In French the word does nothing of the sort. Manqué is the ordinary past participle of manquer, to miss, it behaves like any other adjective, and it attaches to events far more readily than to persons: un rendez-vous manqué, une occasion manquée, un coup manqué. So un contrôle manqué is a test that did not take place, because the athlete was not where he had said he would be, and not a test that fell short of being a proper one. The one common French phrase that does put the word on a person is un garçon manqué, which means a tomboy and nothing sadder than that, so even there the English sense would mislead.