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MIAMI, March 20 — Former world number one Simona Halep’s return to tennis ended in a first-round defeat at the Miami Open on Tuesday as she lost 6-1, 4-6, 3-6 to Spain’s Paula Badosa.
Romanian Halep, 32, was playing for the first time since the 2022 US Open after her doping ban was reduced after a successful appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport last week.
But while two-time Grand Slam winner Halep looked like her old self in the opening set, cheered on by a small but passionate crowd, including many of her compatriots, she struggled later in the near two-hour contest.
There were the familiar chants of ‘Simona’ as she broke to go 4-1 up in the first set and the fist-pump showed the level of motivation after her lengthy, enforced absence.
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But she needed treatment to her shoulder during the second set and she lost the accuracy of her serve while looking increasingly tired.
Halep’s 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.
Paula Badosa of Spain returns a shot to Simona Halep of Romania during her women’s singles match during the Miami Open at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida March 19, 2024. — Picture by Megan Briggs/Getty Images via AFP
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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 International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) which would have effectively ended her career.
Halep appealed to 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.
CAS determined that Halep had “established, on the balance of probabilities” that the banned substance did come from the contaminated product and her violations were therefore “not intentional.”
CAS also ruled that the “irregularities” cited by the ITIA in Halep’s biological passport, a longterm monitoring tool of an athlete’s blood indicators that can provide evidence of doping, did not, in fact, support “the doping scenarios put forward by the ITIA.”
Halep had protested her innocence and refused to accept the ITIA decision, which would have kept her off the courts until October 6, 2026. — AFP
