Simona Halep, a former Wimbledon champion, banned for doping.
Simona Halep, a former Wimbledon and French Open winner, is optimistic that she will soon resume playing tennis following the hearing of her appeal about a doping suspension.
After it was discovered that former World No. 1 Halep had taken the prohibited drug roxadustat from a urine sample at the 2022 US Open, she was given a four-year suspension in September.
After leaving sport’s highest court on Friday, the 32-year-old Romanian, who had worried that her career would be all but destroyed if the ban was upheld, expressed optimism.
The sentence, the biggest drug ban in tennis since Maria Sharapova’s in 2016, was the subject of a three-day appeal process.
Halep expressed confidence in her ability to return to the court in her remarks following the appeal hearing.
“It is my belief that the truth will eventually surface and that my day in court will not come too soon,” she said to reporters outside the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Red blood cell formation is stimulated by the illegal substance roxadustat. After testing positive at the US Open in 2022, she was placed on provisional suspension in October of the same year.
Halep was also accused of a second doping offense by tennis anti-doping authorities last year because of anomalies in her athlete biological passport (ABP), a system used to track various blood indicators.
Halep’s attorney, Howard Jacobs, stated that although CAS had heard her arguments, the court’s decision-making timeline was unknown.Halep has attributed her positive test result at the US Open to tainted approved supplements. She claims that when her name was revealed to the panel of experts evaluating her profile, the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) charged her with an ABP violation.
Although an impartial panel acknowledged Halep’s claim that she had consumed a tainted supplement, it concluded that the amount she consumed was insufficient to produce the level of roxadustat detected in her positive sample.