(Lausanne) Romanian tennis champion Simona Halep, former world No. 1 and double Grand Slam winner, arrived Wednesday morning in Lausanne to challenge her four-year suspension for doping before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
Smiling and surrounded by her lawyers, the 32-year-old player entered the Palais Beaulieu, seat of the court, where her closed-door hearing opened at 9:30 a.m. and will be held until Friday 3:30 p.m., noted an AFP photographer and videographer. She made no comment.
Sanctioned last year by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) due to two separate infractions of anti-doping regulations, Simona Halep announced in September her intention to “clear her name” to return to the courts.
His career has been on hold since October 7, 2022, the date of the start of his provisional suspension after a test conducted at the 2022 United States Open tested positive for a banned product, roxadustat, a molecule which stimulates the production of red blood cells and which is classified as an EPO in the regulations of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
The former world number one was then caught up in the spring of 2023 by a second affair, this time “irregularities” in the data of her biological passport, a long-term monitoring tool for high-level athletes.
PHOTO DENIS BALIBOUSE, REUTERS
These two offenses were upheld by the independent tribunal which met at the end of June 2023 in London. If the ITIA “admitted the argument of taking a contaminated food supplement put forward by Halep”, it “determined that the concentration of roxadustat found in the positive sample could not result from the quantity ingested by the player », The anti-doping authority then explained.
As for Halep’s biological passport, the court “has no reason to doubt the unanimous ‘solid opinion’ of the three independent experts that ‘probable doping’ was the explanation for the irregularities”, “on the basis of analysis of 51 blood samples from the player,” the ITIA indicated.
Halep, the first leading tennis player caught in the anti-doping net since the suspension of Maria Sharapova in 2016, has however continued to proclaim her innocence, and still assured last September that she had “never taken any product intentionally prohibited.”
The CAS sentence will be rendered on an as yet unknown date, usually a few weeks to a few months after the hearing.