Romania’s Simona Halep on Friday rounded on the Worldwide Tennis Integrity Company (ITIA) for discrepencies within the remedy of world quantity two Iga Swiatek after testing constructive for a banned substance.
A dejected Simona Halep appears on(Getty)
The ITIA introduced a one-month ban on Thursday for Swiatek after the 23-year-old had examined constructive for the center remedy trimetazidine (TMZ) in an out-of-competition pattern in August 2024, when the Polish participant was ranked primary on this planet.
Halep, now 33, returned to tennis in March this 12 months after her personal profession had been on maintain since October 7, 2022, the date of the beginning of her provisional suspension after testing constructive for roxadustat on the US Open.
The winner of the 2018 French Open and 2019 Wimbledon singles titles was then caught up in a second affair, this time “irregularities” within the information of her organic passport.
She was handed a four-year ban by the ITIA, however Halep efficiently appealed to the Courtroom of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in February, arguing her constructive check for roxadustat — used to deal with anaemia and banned as a blood doping agent — was the results of a tainted complement.
“I wonder why there is such a difference in treatment and judgment? I don’t find and I don’t think there can be a logical answer,” Halep stated in a protracted message posted in Romanian on her Instagram account.
“It can only be bad will on the part of the ITIA, the organisation that did everything to destroy me despite the evidence. It wanted at all costs to destroy the last years of my career.”
Halep, now sitting 877th on this planet rankings, added: “I suffered, I suffer and I will perhaps always suffer from the injustice that was done to me.
“How is it attainable that in similar instances going down at roughly the identical time, the ITIA has fully totally different approaches, to my detriment?
“I lost two years of my career, I suffered many sleepless nights, thoughts, anxiety, unanswered questions… but I got justice. It turned out that it was a contamination and that (the anomaly in my) biological passport was pure invention.”