FILE – Simona Halep, of Romania, returns a shot to Daria Snigur, of Ukraine, during the first round of the U.S. Open tennis championships Aug. 29, 2022, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
Former Wimbledon and French Open champion Simona Halep slammed the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) for the way her own doping case was handled compared to Iga Swiatek.
“I sit and try to understand but it is really impossible for me to understand something like this. 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 organisation that did absolutely everything to destroy me despite the evidence,” Halep said on Instagram on Friday as per AP.
On Thursday, world number 2 Swiatek accepted a one-month suspension by ITIA after testing positive for the banned substance trimetazidine, a heart medication known as TMZ. The Polish player 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.
Reacting to that, Halep, who received a four-year suspension after testing positive for the banned drug Roxadustat at the 2022 US Open, said that ITIA had approached the two identical cases very differently.
Halep’s suspension was reduced by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to nine months after CAS accepted her explanation of a contaminated supplement. But, she missed 1 & 1/2 years of playing.
“I have always believed in good, I have believed in the fairness of this sport, I have believed in kindness. The injustice that was done to me was painful, is painful and maybe will always be painful. How is it possible that in identical cases that happened at about the same time (of the season), ITIA has completely different approaches, to my detriment?” she said on the Instagram post.
(With agency inputs)
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