Tennis star Simona Halep in court to appeal doping ban
After her 2022 suspension following a positive test for the banned drug roxadustat at the U.S. Open, Romanian tennis player Simona Halep has started her appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne.
The 32-year-old former Wimbledon and French Open champion was slapped with another doping charge in 2023 due to irregularities in her athlete biological passport (ABP), a method designed to monitor different blood parameters over time to reveal potential doping.
She has strongly denied the roxadustat doping charge of which she had evidence to show small amounts of the anaemia drug entered her system from a contaminated licensed supplement.
Halep has accused the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) of charging her with an ABP violation after the group of experts who assessed her profile learned her identity.
An independent tribunal accepted Halep's argument that she had taken a contaminated supplement but determined the volume she ingested could not have resulted in the concentration of roxadustat found in her positive sample.
"The ITIA relied solely on the opinions of these experts who looked only at my blood parameters - which I've maintained for more than 10 years in the same range… This group ignored the fact that no prohibited substance has ever been found in my blood or urine samples with the sole exception of one August 29 positive test for roxadustat," she said last year after ITIA’s four-year ban decision which runs until October 6, 2026.
The ITIA said it came to its conclusion based on the collection and analysis of 51 blood samples provided by Halep.
"The volume of evidence for the tribunal to consider in both the roxadustat and ABP proceedings was substantial," Karen Moorhouse, CEO at the ITIA told the media after the agency released its concluding statement last year.
CAS said it was unclear when a ruling might be made after the three-day proceedings and stated that Halep would not make any statement until the proceedings end.
"It's catastrophic if it's going to be four years… I don't know how I will handle it. Probably it will be the end of my career," Simona Halep told Euronews in December last year.
