9 months instead of 4 years

Eligible to play! CAS reduces Halep’s doping ban

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne reduced the doping ban of former world number one Simona Halep from four years to nine months on Tuesday. The Romanian is therefore eligible to play again with immediate effect. Halep had been banned for two doping violations since October 2022.

After a three-day hearing at the beginning of February, the sports court concluded that Halep's positive test came from a "contaminated supplement" and that the anomalies in her biological passport could be linked to a "surgical procedure", as it said in a statement.

Halep, who won the French Open in 2018 and Wimbledon in 2019, had always maintained her innocence and assured in September that she had "never intentionally taken banned substances".