What did the CAS ruling say when reducing Simona Halep's ban for doping?

Simona Halep was cleared for immediate return to tennis after Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), sports’ highest court, accepted she was not entirely at fault for her positive doping test at the 2022 US Open.

She had tested positive for the banned blood-booster roxadustat. It can help produce more of the natural hormone erythropoietin, or EPO, which has long been a product used by athletes to boost endurance.

Halep, a 2018 French Open and 2019 Wimbledon winner, was also caught up in a second affair , this time over “irregularities” in the data of her biological passport, a long-term monitoring tool of an athlete’s blood indicators that could indicate doping.

The Romanian was initially handed a four-year ban by International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA), until October 2026, which threatened to end the career of the 32-year-old.

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CAS lifted the allegation of suspected doping cheat from Halep, whose career has been on hold for more than a year.

Simona’s four-year ban was cut to just nine months and, applied retroactively, expired last July.

The CAS judges also awarded Halep 20,000 Swiss francs ($22,650) towards her legal fees from the ITIA.

What did the CAS ruling say on Simona Halep?

Three CAS judges found Halep had “on the balance of probabilities” justified that her positive test was unintentional and caused by a contaminated supplement.

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“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,” CAS said.

“The CAS Panel has unanimously determined that the four-year period of ineligibility imposed by the ITF Independent Tribunal is to be reduced to a period of ineligibility of nine months starting on 7 October 2022, which period expired on 6 July 2023,” CAS said on Tuesday.

The court in its statement said, “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.”

Concerning Halep’s biological passport, CAS took into account “the results of a private blood sample given by Ms. Halep on 9 September 2022 in the context of a surgery which occurred shortly thereafter” judging that these elements made “the doping scenarios put forward by the ITIA” implausible.

How did Simona Halep react?

“I cannot wait to return to the tour,” Halep said in a statement released by her lawyer, Howard Jacobs, who noted she has filed a lawsuit against the supplement maker.

She hailed her win against “scandalous accusations” and what she called the “seemingly unlimited resources” of tennis authorities which prosecuted her.

“Throughout this long and difficult process, I have maintained my belief that the truth would eventually come out, and that a just decision would be reached, because I am and always have been a clean athlete,” Halep said in a statement.

“My faith in the process was tested by the scandalous accusations that were levelled against me, and by the seemingly unlimited resources that were aligned against me. But in the end, the truth prevailed, even if it took much longer than I wish it had.”