Two-time Grand Slam champion Simona Halep has been cleared to return to tennis after the Court of Arbitration for Sport reduced her suspension from four years to nine months.
The reduction of her suspension means that she can return to playing immediately.
The CAS panel accepted that she was not entirely at fault for a positive doping test, and assigned her period of ineligibility starting October 7 of 2022. That means the period of suspension expired last July.
The four-year ban had dated back to October 2022 in September of last year, with the former world No. 1 having been found guilty of testing positive for the banned substance roxadustat. She was later charged with and found guilty of an additional anti-doping rule violation when her Athlete Biological passport was found to have “established use of a prohibited substance and/or prohibited method” over an extended period of time.
“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,” the CAS said in a statement.
“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.”
As for the ABP charge, the CAS dismissed the charge saying that it was “not comfortably satisfied” that a violation had occurred.
“I cannot wait to return to the tour,” Halep said in a statement released by her lawyer, Howard Jacobs. Jacobs also noted that Halep has since filed a lawsuit against the maker of her supplement.
She also hailed the win against “scandalous accusations” aimed toward her. Had she continued to serve the ban, she would not have returned to tennis until October 2026, after turning 35 years old.
