Romanian Simona Halep, former world No. 1 and double Grand Slam winner, expressed her confidence on Friday at the end of her two-day hearing before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), where she challenged her suspension of four years for doping.
“This hearing gave me the opportunity to explain my situation and defend my innocence. My confidence in the predominance of truth remains intact. I can’t wait to get back on the tennis courts,” Halep said in a statement.
Accompanied by her lawyers, the 32-year-old player began her hearing behind closed doors on Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. in Lausanne, where the court sits. This concluded on Friday at 3:30 p.m. “with the final pleadings of the parties,” indicated the CAS for its part.
Sanctioned last year by the International Agency for Tennis Integrity (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 carried out at the US Open 2022, 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 monitoring tool for high-level athletes.
These two offenses were upheld by the independent court meeting at the end of June 2023 in London. If 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 “.
As for Halep’s biological passport, the court “has no reason to doubt the solid unanimous opinion of the three independent experts that probable doping was the explanation for the irregularities”, “based on the analysis of 51 samples blood of the player,” indicated Itia.
Halep, the first high-level tennis player caught in the anti-doping net since the suspension of Maria Sharapova in 2016, has however continued to proclaim her innocence, and again assured last September that she had “never taken any intentionally prohibited product.
The CAS sentence will be rendered on an as yet unknown date, usually a few weeks to a few months after the hearing.
