The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) revealed on Thursday that Iga Swiatek, world No. 2, had tested positive for a banned substance, but the four-time Roland-Garros winner nevertheless only received fines. a short suspension.
First suspended until 2026 for a positive test at the 2022 US Open, and an anomaly on her biological passport, Simona Halep, for her part, saw the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) reduce the sanction in March 2024 at nine months, which allowed him to return to the courts.
“I wonder why such a difference in treatment and judgment? I can’t find and I don’t think there can be a logical answer,” lamented the player in a long message posted in Romanian on her Instagram account.
“It can only be bad will on the part of ITIA, the organization that did everything to destroy me despite the evidence. She wanted to destroy the last years of my career at all costs,” she assures.
“I have suffered, I am suffering and perhaps I will always suffer from the injustice done to me. How is it possible that in identical cases taking place at approximately the same time, the ITIA has completely different approaches to my detriment,” asks the 33-year-old player, who has fallen to 877th in the world.
“I lost two years of my career, I lost a lot of 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 a pure invention,” says the Romanian, titled at Roland-Garros in 2018 and at Wimbledon in 2019.
