Simona Halep cleared to return to court after four-year doping ban reduced

Former world No 1 Simona Halep has been cleared to resume her tennis career with immediate effect after a four-year ban for doping was reduced to nine months following an appeal.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled partly in favour of Halep after the two-time grand slam champion appealed against a four-year ban imposed by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA).

Halep, 32, blamed contaminated nutritional supplements after testing positive for the banned substance Roxadustat at the 2022 US Open.

In making its decision, the three-person CAS panel ruled that Halep’s anti-doping violations “were not intentional” and she “bore no significant fault or negligence”.

It decided Halep “established, on the balance of probabilities” that Roxadustat, a blood-boosting substance similar to EPO, had “entered her body through the consumption of a contaminated supplement”.

The panel also dismissed a separate charge, also brought forward by the ITIA, after investigators found irregularities in her athlete biological passport (ABP).

The Romanian, who won the French Open in 2018 and Wimbledon in 2019, feared her career would be over if CAS upheld her suspension and vowed to “fight for the truth”.

Having already served a provisional suspension since October 2022, and with her new nine-month ban having already expired in July 2023, Halep has been cleared to make an immediate return to court.

Halep strenuously denied wrongdoing after testing positive for Roxadustat following her first-round defeat at the US Open on 29 August 2022.

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Halep’s former coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, said in a video statement posted in November 2023 that he took the blame on behalf of his team. Halep’s physiotherapist, Candice Gohier, recommended that Halep add a collagen supplement to her nutrition plan before her positive test and Mouratoglou said the “collagen happened to be contaminated”.

While an independent tribunal accepted Halep’s argument that she had taken contaminated supplements, they ruled that the volume she ingested could not have resulted in the concentration of Roxadustat found in her positive sample and Halep was hit with a four-year ban.

The CAS panel took an entirely different view and “unanimously determined that the four-year period of ineligibility imposed by the ITF [International Tennis Federation] is to be reduced to a period of ineligibility of nine months”.

It ruled: “Having carefully considered all the evidence put before it, the CAS panel determined that Ms Halep had established, on the balance of probabilities, that the Roxadustat entered her body through the consumption of a contaminated supplement which she had used in the days shortly before 29 August 2022 and that the Roxadustat, as detected in her sample, came from that contaminated product.

“As a result, the CAS panel determined that Ms Halep had also established, on the balance of probabilities, that her anti-doping rule violations were not intentional.

“Although the CAS panel found that Ms Halep did bear some level of fault or negligence for her violations, as she did not exercise sufficient care when using the Keto MCT supplement, it concluded that she bore no significant fault or negligence.”

The CAS panel said the ABP charge was dismissed on the basis that the sample given in late 2022 was shortly after a surgery and that Halep had said she was not going to compete for the rest of that year.