Former world no. 1 Simona Halep has gotten a four-year ban from lawn tennis after violation of the sport’s anti-doping program.
According to the International Tennis Integrity Agency, the 31-year-old Romanian tested positive for the banned substance roxadustat last year and was charged with a separate second anti-doping breach in May “relating to irregularities in her athlete biological passport (ABP)”.
Halep did not participate in the 2023 US Open because she has been provisionally suspended since October 2022.
An independent tribunal said this would count in her period of full suspension, which will now run from October 7 2022 to October 6, 2026.
Halep was the winner of the women’s singles titles at the 2018 French Open and 2019 Wimbledon championships.
On September 11, the tribunal confirmed it had found Halep had committed intentional violations under Article 2 of the Tennis Anti-Doping Programme (TADP).
One of these was the presence and use of roxadustat as evidenced in Halep’s urine sample collected on August 29 2022 at the US Open.
