The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on Tuesday reduced the ban imposed on Romanian tennis champion Simona Halep from four years to nine months for two anti-doping rule violations, which she has been serving since last July.
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After a three-day hearing at the beginning of February, the sports court decided that the former world number one's positive test was due to a “contaminated nutritional supplement” and that the abnormalities in his biological passport were not sufficient to prove doping behavior, according to a press release.
The CAS therefore distanced itself from the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA), which had sanctioned Simona Halep on September 22, 2023, and called for “a ban period of four to six years” against the two-time Grand Slam winner in this arbitration procedure.
The court in Lausanne promises to clarify “as soon as possible” the practical consequences of its decision, namely a suspension from October 7, 2022 to July 6, 2023 – already served before Simona Halep lodges an appeal – and annulment all results between August 29, 2022 and October 7, 2022.
Halep's career has been on hold since October 7, 2022, the date his interim suspension began after a test taken at the 2022 US Open came back positive for roxadustat, a molecule that stimulates red blood cell production and is classified under the EPA in the regulations of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Then, in the spring of 2023, the former world No. 1 was caught up in a second affair, this time by “irregularities” in the data on her biological passport, a long-term monitoring tool for top athletes.
In the first instance, the ITIA had “admitted the argument put forward by Halep that he had taken a contaminated dietary supplement”, but “found that the concentration of roxadustat found in the positive sample could not be attributed to the amount taken by the player” – a statement of reasons on Tuesday refuted by the TAS.
Regarding Halep's biological passport, the CAS included in its justification “the results of a private blood sample provided by Ms. Halep on September 9, 2022 as part of a surgical procedure”, although it waived any competition for the rest had year and concluded that these elements made “the doping scenarios put forward by the ITIA” unreliable.