Away from the courts for a year and a half, Simona Halep “can’t wait to come back”: the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on Tuesday reduced her suspension from four years to nine months, already served, for two infractions of anti-doping regulations.
The 32-year-old Romanian champion, former world No. 1 and double Grand Slam winner, tested positive for a banned product during the 2022 US Open, before “irregularities” in her biological passport were revealed. add to his case the following spring.
But after three days of hearing at the beginning of February, the sports court attributed his positive test to a “contaminated supplement”, and considered that the elements taken from his blood monitoring were not sufficient to establish doping behavior.
“I can’t wait to return to the circuit,” declared the player in a press release, who had claimed since the start of the affair to have “never taken any prohibited product intentionally”.
“I am and have always been an impeccable athlete,” continued the Romanian, deploring “the scandalous accusations” against her and “the apparently unlimited resources” used against her. “In the end, the truth prevailed, although it took much longer than I would have liked. »
A molecule close to EPO
The CAS therefore disavowed the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA), which had sanctioned Simona Halep on September 22, 2023, and demanded in this arbitration procedure “a period of suspension ranging from four to six years” against the winner. of Roland-Garros 2018 and Wimbledon 2019.
The Lausanne court promises to specify “as soon as possible” the practical consequences of its decision, namely a suspension from October 7, 2022 to July 6, 2023 – already served even before Simona Halep appeals – and the annulment of all its results between August 29, 2022 and October 7, 2022.
The reduction in the sanction implies “that Simona Halep should have been eligible to play the last two Grand Slam tournaments”, namely the US Open 2023 and the Australian Open 2024, underlines one of her three lawyers, the American Howard Jacobs, in a press release.
Halep’s career has been on hold since October 7, 2022, the date of the start of his provisional suspension after a test carried out at the US Open 2022, positive for roxadustat, a molecule which stimulates the production of red blood cells and which is classified among the EPO in the regulations of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Nose surgery
The former world No. 1 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.
Ruling at first instance, the ITIA had “admitted the argument of taking a contaminated food supplement put forward by Halep”, but “determined that the concentration of roxadustat found in the positive sample could not result from the quantity ingested by the player” — a reasoning invalidated Tuesday by the CAS.
Concerning Halep’s biological passport, the disciplinary body said it had “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 the analysis of 51 blood samples from the player”.
But the CAS integrated into its reasoning “the results of a private blood sample provided by Mr.me Halep on September 9, 2022, in the context of a surgical operation” and while she had given up all competition for the rest of the year, judging that these elements made “the doping scenarios put forward by the ITIA implausible “.
Halep, then world number nine, explained that she had been suffering “for some time” from breathing problems which had worsened during the summer of 2022, and had ended her season to recover from a nose operation.