The 32-year-old player, sanctioned last year by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) due to two separate infractions of anti-doping regulations, announced her intention to “clear her name” to return to the short.
The winner of Roland-Garros 2018 and Wimbledon 2019 “will be present” at the hearing held in Lausanne, where the parties, witnesses and experts will be heard either in person or by videoconference, the supreme court of the sporting world announced this Tuesday, February 6 in a press release.
“As neither party has requested a public hearing”, the debates will be held behind closed doors from 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday February 7 and until approximately 3:30 p.m. on Friday, without Simona Halep communicating on her side, before a sentence rendered on a date still unknown, specifies the CAS.
Simona Halep's career has been on hold since October 7, 2022, the date of the start of her provisional suspension after a test carried out at the US Open 2022, positive for a banned product, roxadustat, a molecule which stimulates the production of red blood cells and which is classified as EPO in the regulations of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
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The former world number one was then caught up in the spring of 2023 by a second affair, this time “irregularities” in the data of her biological passport, a long-term monitoring tool for high-level athletes.
These two offenses were upheld by the independent tribunal which met at the end of June 2023 in London.
If the ITIA “admitted the argument of taking a contaminated food supplement put forward by Simona Halep”, it “determined that the concentration of roxadustat found in the positive sample could not result from the quantity ingested by the player,” the anti-doping authority then explained.
As for Halep's biological passport, the court "has no reason to doubt the solid unanimous opinion of the three independent experts that probable doping was the explanation for the irregularities", "based on the analysis of 51 samples blood of the player,” indicated the ITIA.
Halep, the first leading tennis player caught in the anti-doping net since the suspension of Maria Sharapova in 2016, has however continued to proclaim her innocence, and still assured last September that she had “never taken any product intentionally prohibited.”