Two-time Grand Slam champion, Simona Halep free to return after doping ban reduced by CAS

The highest court in tennis decided on Tuesday that Simona Halep, a two-time Grand Slam champion, was not solely to blame for her failed doping test, allowing her to resume playing games right away. Halep's appeal was partially upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport's justices, who suspended her for nine months instead of four years. July of last year was the end of its retroactive application. 

Halep's initial four-year ban came about as a result of two different anti-doping code violations. But the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne decided that her suspension ought to be shortened to nine months, which she has already completed. "The CAS Panel has unanimously determined that the four-year period of ineligibility imposed by the ITF (International Tennis Federation) Independent Tribunal is to be reduced to a period of ineligibility of nine (9) months starting on 7 October 2022, which period expired on 6 July 2023," the court said in a statement.

Following a positive test for the prohibited substance roxadustat, which stimulates the production of red blood cells, during the United States Open in 2022, the 32-year-old Romanian was suspended in October of that same year. Because of irregularities in her athlete biological passport (ABP), a system for tracking multiple blood parameters over time to identify possible doping, she was also accused of committing another doping offence last year. Halep had fiercely refuted the accusations made against her. Halep claimed that contaminated supplements were the cause of her positive test result at the US Open and that she was being charged with an ABP violation by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) after their specialists looked through her profile and found her name.

Despite accepting Halep's assertion that she had taken tainted supplements, an impartial panel concluded that her dietary intake was insufficient to produce the level of roxadustat found in her positive sample. Though Halep should have been more careful when ingesting the supplement, the CAS Panel found that she was not solely to blame for the infringement. In addition, Halep had declared that she would not compete for the rest of the year, and the sample taken in late 2022 came right after surgery, which is another reason the ABP complaint was dropped.