Halep rounds on tennis doping body for Swiatek leniency

Romania's Simona Halep on Friday rounded on the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) for discrepencies in the treatment of world number two Iga Swiatek after testing positive for a banned substance.

The ITIA announced a one-month ban on Thursday for Swiatek after the 23-year-old had tested positive for the heart medication trimetazidine (TMZ) in an out-of-competition sample in August 2024, when the Polish player was ranked number one in the world.

Halep, now 33, returned to tennis in March this year after her own career had been on hold since October 7, 2022, the date of the start of her provisional suspension after testing positive for roxadustat at the US Open.

The winner of the 2018 French Open and 2019 Wimbledon singles titles was then caught up in a second affair, this time "irregularities" in the data of her biological passport.

She was handed a four-year ban by the ITIA, but Halep successfully appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in February, arguing her positive test for roxadustat -- used to treat anaemia and banned as a blood doping agent -- was the result of a tainted supplement.

"I wonder why there is such a difference in treatment and judgment? I don't find and I don't think there can be a logical answer," Halep said in a long message posted in Romanian on her Instagram account.

"It can only be bad will on the part of the ITIA, the organisation that did everything to destroy me despite the evidence. It wanted at all costs to destroy the last years of my career."

Halep, now sitting 877th in the world rankings, added: "I suffered, I suffer and I will perhaps always suffer from the injustice that was done to me.

"How is it possible that in identical cases taking place at roughly the same time, the ITIA has completely different approaches, to my detriment?

"I lost two years of my career, I suffered many sleepless nights, thoughts, anxiety, unanswered questions... but I got justice. It turned out that it was a contamination and that (the anomaly in my) biological passport was pure invention."