Simona Halep publicly criticized the leniency which, according to her, Iga Swiatek benefited from, suspended for one month for a positive test, while she herself had received an initial suspension of four years.
The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) revealed Thursday that Swiatek (WTA 2) had tested positive for a banned substance, but the four-time Roland-Garros winner nevertheless received only a short suspension .
“I wonder why such a difference in treatment and judgment? I do not find and I do not think that there can be a logical answer”lamented Halep (33) in a long message posted in Romanian on his Instagram account. “It can only be bad will on the part of the ITIA, the organization which did everything to destroy me despite the evidence. It wanted at all costs to destroy the last years of my career”.
First suspended until 2026 for a positive test at the 2022 US Open, and an anomaly on her biological passport, Halep saw the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) reduce the sanction to 9 months in March 2024, which allowed him to return to the courts.
I lost two years of my career
“I have suffered, am suffering and perhaps always will suffer from the injustice done to me. How is it possible that in identical cases taking place around the same time, the ITIA has completely different approaches to my detriment”asks the 33-year-old player, who has fallen back to 877th in the world.
“I lost two years of my career, I lost a lot of nights where I couldn’t sleep, thoughts, anxiety, unanswered questions…but I got justice. It turned out that it was a contamination and that (the anomaly of his) biological passport was a pure invention.”says the Romanian, titled at Roland-Garros in 2018 and at Wimbledon in 2019.
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