Simona Halep calls out WTA Player’s Council who ‘denied’ her retaining ranking after doping case
Simona Halep has made a subtle dig at the WTA Player’s Council, after she was unable to retain her ranking following spending 19 months suspended for an anti-doping violation.
Halep failed an anti-doping test at the 2022 US Open, after the prohibited substance roxadustat was found in her system.
The former World No.1 was originally given a four-year ban, but appealed this to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on the grounds of contamination.
As a result, the CAS reduced the ban from four years to nine months after agreeing that the positive test was likely caused by a contaminated supplement, meaning that Halep could return to action straight away in March earlier this year.
Halep played her first match in 19 months at the Miami Open, after receiving a wildcard because she was unranked.
To the fans, players, WTA and @MiamiOpen tournament staff, thank you for making my comeback so special 🫶 pic.twitter.com/GWeV1m8rQ6
— Simona Halep (@Simona_Halep) March 20, 2024
After playing only three tournaments since then, Halep appears to be disappointed at the lack of support given to her when returning to the WTA Tour.
This was highlighted yesterday when Halep reposted an Instagram story by @wta_romania saying, “So apparently Simona tried to get help from the WTA Player’s Council about getting her ranking back and they denied her. Easy to see why when you see who the player’s council.”
With this caption was a screenshot of the names on the WTA Player’s Council list, featuring Victoria Azarenka, Caroline Garcia, Madison Keys, Jessica Pegula, Donna Vekic, Daria Saville, Gabriela Dabrowski and Aleksandra Krunic.
Halep has been very vocal with her frustrations about how she feels to have been treated differently from the likes of Iga Swiatek and Jannik Sinner, who received much lesser punishments for their positive doping tests.
When speaking to the Telegraph in a recent interview, Halep said, “The woman player [Swiatek] – I don’t want to give name, you know about who I’m talking about – she had the three-week suspension, then she played two events, and then she gets again suspension. What is this? I mean, I don’t understand. So I feel it is not fair.”
The two-time Grand Slam champion continued, “What I believe is not fair, either, is that they announced my case straight away, and I got all the heat from the press, and for these two players they kept it secret, and they just said about the case when everything was done, so it’s very weird.
“And I asked also to lift the provisional suspension to be able to play. I said, ‘If you believe in the end that I am guilty, you take the points back and all the money and everything, but let me play,’ because I wanted to keep the rhythm. I asked this about two or three times, but now they [Sinner and Swiatek] could play.”
Swiatek accepted a one month suspension after being cleared of any wrongdoing, while Sinner was able to continue playing for a similar reason, but currently faces an appeal from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
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Inside the baseline…
It is very clear just how aggrieved Simona Halep feels, and this has only been heightened by the recent cases of Iga Swiatek and Jannik Sinner. Halep was not so supportive of Maria Sharapova back in 2017 for her doping offences, and was very vocal about the fact that she didn’t believe the Russian deserve wildcards for WTA events following her 15-month ban, so it would be interesting to know whether her opinions on that situation have changed after going through something similar herself.
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