Halep disgusted at Swiatek ban
Simona Halep, the former Wimbledon and French Open champion, has expressed dismay at the way Iga Swiatek’s doping case was handled compared to her own.
Halep, a 33-year-old Romanian who initially received a four-year ban for doping, said there had been severe differences in how their cases were treated by tennis authorities.
“I sit and try to understand but it is really impossible for me to understand something like this,” Halep posted on Friday on her Instagram account. “I sit and wonder, ‘Why such a big difference in treatment and judgment?’
“I can’t find, and I don’t think there can be, a logical answer. It can only be bad will on the part of ITIA, the organization that did absolutely everything to destroy me despite the evidence.”
The International Tennis Integrity Agency announced on Thursday that the five-time major champion Swiatek accepted a one-month suspension after testing positive for the banned substance trimetazidine, a heart medication known as TMZ.
The 23-year-old Polish sensation failed an out-of-competition drug test in August, and the ITIA accepted her explanation that the result was unintentional and was caused by the contamination of a nonprescription medication, melatonin, that Swiatek was taking for issues with jet lag and sleeping.
Halep, who won the French Open in 2018 and Wimbledon in 2019, received a four-year suspension after testing positive for the banned drug roxadustat at the 2022 US Open.
