American rugby player Alev Kelter handed three-game ban for stamping on Wallaroo's head
The former ice hockey and soccer player was sent off late in the Wallaroos' 27-19 win for an act which referee Aimee Barrett-Theron labelled "thuggery".
A three-time Olympian who won bronze for the American sevens team in Paris last year, Kelter took a hit-up and then stamped repeatedly with her boot on Georgina Friedrichs's head as she was clinging to her other leg.
On Tuesday, Kelter appeared before an independent disciplinary committee in New Zealand, where the US will face the Black Ferns in the next round.
Kelter told the committee, chaired by Michael Heron KC (New Zealand) and former international players Becky Essex (England) and Ofisa Tonu'u (New Zealand), she accepted she had committed an act of foul play and that the referee's decision to award a red card was correct.
The committee, however, accepted Kelter's evidence she did not intend to contact the head and her act was reckless rather than deliberate.
The three-game ban rules her out of the last round of the Pacific Four and two club games with her Bay Breakers team back in the USA.
AAP
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