Simona Halep, a former Wimbledon and French Open champion tennis player, has expressed her dismay at the way Iga Swiatek’s doping case was handled compared to her own.
Halep, a 33-year-old Romanian who was initially suspended for four years for doping, said there were serious differences in the way their cases were handled by tennis authorities.
“I sit and try to understand but it’s really impossible for me to understand something like this,” Halep posted Friday on her Instagram account. “I sit back and ask myself, ‘Why such a big difference in treatment and judgment?’
“I can’t find, and I don’t think there can be, a logical answer. This 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 Thursday that five-time major champion Swiatek had agreed to a one-month suspension after testing positive for the banned substance trimetazidine, a heart medication known as TMZ.
The 23-year-old Polish player failed an out-of-competition doping test in August, and the ITIA accepted her explanation that the result was unintentional and was due to contamination of the over-the-counter drug melatonin , which Swiatek took for problems. with jet lag and sleep.
Halep, winner of the French Open in 2018 and Wimbledon in 2019, was suspended for four years after testing positive. for the banned drug Roxadustat at the 2022 US Open.
His suspension was reduced by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to nine months after the SAE accepted his explanation for a contaminated supplement. But she missed 1 year and a half of play.
“I always believed in good, I believed in the fairness of this sport, I believed in kindness,” Halep wrote on Instagram. “The injustice done to me was painful, is painful and perhaps always will be. How is it possible that in identical cases occurring around the same time (of the season), the ITIA have completely different approaches, to my detriment?
Swiatek’s case prompted men’s tennis player Nick Kyrgios, a 2022 Wimbledon finalist, to post ‘OUR SPORT IS COOKED’ onformerly known as Twitter.
Canadian tennis player Denis Shapovalov, ranked 56th, posted a sarcastic-sounding comment: “ 1 month ban eh » on his page.
Swiatek’s case follows a similar case involving Jannik Sinner, the top men’s player.
Sinner tested positive twice for an anabolic steroid in March but was not banned in an ITIA decision because the agency determined he wasn’t to blame.
This led some observers to assert a two-tier system, with critics saying it offered protection to Sinner due to his status as a high-profile player.
Earlier this month, ATP Tour president Andrea Gaudenzi acknowledged “ could have been better communication ” explaining the rules involved in Sinner’s doping casebut refuted allegations of double standards.
The decision to clear Sinner was, however, the subject of an appeal by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in September.
WADA is request a ban of one to two years and the CAS, based in Switzerland, is expected to issue a final decision on the case in 2025.
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AP Tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis
