Written by Alex Talel
The overwhelming majority of professional tennis players, even those who spend their careers ranked within the top-10 in the world, never win a Grand Slam tournament. Simona Halep won two. But her illustrious career ended at the ripe old age of 31 due to a fundamentally unfair legal process initiated by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) and overseen by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). As indicated by Halep’s case, in addition to contemporaneous and subsequent cases, the adjudicative process for doping allegations against tennis professionals is in dire need of structural refinement.
The Halep Case
Halep’s case was the strangest kind—one in which an individual successfully defends against a charge but is nevertheless found guilty of it, and then is subsequently exonerated in what amounts to a pyrrhic victory. This trajectory has highlighted the perilously flawed process through which the ITIA and CAS adjudicated her doping dispute.
The ITIA administers the global Tennis Anti-Doping Programme (TADP) whereby athletes are tested for substances banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). If the ITIA identifies a violation, the case is typically then heard by an independent tribunal. Appeals from those hearings are heard de novo at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland.
In October 2022, the ITIA informed Halep that both of two samples taken from her during mandatory drug testing at the U.S. Open in August 2022 had tested positive for roxadustat, a banned substance used primarily to treat dialysis patients by boosting their red blood cell count. Accelerating red blood cell production increases the amount of oxygen available in the body–a particularly helpful condition for professional athletes.
Halep immediately and vehemently denied that she had knowingly taken the substance. Numerous professional coaches and colleagues quickly backed her up. As the subsequent months would come to show, that support could not save Halep.
As an Olympic sport, tennis follows WADA principles when it comes to failed drug tests and suspensions. ITIA suspensions are, therefore, often far harsher than major team sport penalties, where even serious doping suspensions last a year at most. But despite a squeaky-clean record, the ITIA slapped Halep with an extraordinary four-year ban from competition.
That ITIA tribunal didn’t even convene until June 2023, which was nearly a year after Halep’s failed drug test. Under fundamental due process principles, even a short delay can unfairly prejudice an accused individual. That’s particularly true in Halep’s case. Over the ten months before the tribunal heard her case, an obvious pall was cast over Halep and she was unable to compete professionally, causing irreparable harm to her reputation and costing her millions in prize money and possible endorsements.
In September 2023, the independent tribunal finally ruled in Halep’s case, accepting Halep’s primary defense that a non-banned supplement she had taken (Keto MCT) happened to have been contaminated with the banned roxadustat and, therefore, that she had not knowingly ingested a banned substance.
But stunningly, the tribunal nevertheless upheld Halep’s four-year suspension.
Despite accepting Halep’s defense of unintentional ingestion, the tribunal also determined that the concentration of roxadustat reflected in her failed drug test could not be explained by that unintentional ingestion alone, finding that there must have been another source of roxadustat in her system. The tribunal ruled that in order to avoid the four-year ban, Halep had to identify that other source and prove that she had ingested it accidentally as well. How could Halep be expected to identify a separate source of the same substance she had already proven that she didn’t knowingly ingest? The tribunal acknowledged the absurdity of its position: “We recognise that our conclusions involve a finding of something which in itself appears highly improbable: that around the same time in 2022, Ms. Halep ingested Roxadustat from two entirely separate sources, [a nutritional supplement] and another source never identified.”
But largely on the strength of this admittedly “improbable” scenario, the tribunal found against Halep, despite Halep’s expert witness having demonstrated similar levels of roxadustat in samples of Keto MCT-consuming volunteers as had been identified in Halep’s samples. In other words, there was no reason to believe that a roxadustat source other than the Keto MCT was responsible for Halep’s positive test.
Halep promptly appealed the decision to the CAS. In March of 2024, the CAS ruled largely in Halep’s favor, providing its full reasoned decision in October of 2024.
Typically, the more serious the allegation, the more convincing the evidence must be in order for the CAS to rule against the accused. With the tribunal’s ruling heavily relying on an admittedly “improbable” theory, the CAS surely thought long and hard before rubber-stamping the decision.
The CAS ultimately reduced Halep’s suspension from four years to nine months, allowing her to return immediately to competitive play. The victory was pyrrhic—in February of 2025, Halep announced her retirement from professional tennis. At the highest level of professional tennis, a multi-year break from competition at an advanced stage of one’s career is an insurmountable obstacle to returning to anything approaching top form. In Halep’s case, she returned from suspension to play six total matches, losing five of them.
The Tara Moore Case
Halep thus suffered an ignominious end to her highly decorated career as a consequence of the ITIA’s highly questionable substantive and procedural protocols and findings, including its aggressive prosecution of her case. Around that same time, one of Halep’s colleagues was also suffering from the ITIA’s aggressive tactics and a corresponding lack of clarity from the CAS.
Doubles specialist Tara Moore had tested positive for boldenone and nandrolone, two steroids associated with Colombian cattle farming. Moore had been competing in Bogota at the time, where two others players had also tested positive for boldenone. Additionally, top-ranked doubles player Robert Farah, a Colombian, had tested positive for boldenone the year prior after eating local beef, and had been exonerated. Therefore, accidental contamination seemed a reasonable conclusion in Moore’s case. But the ITIA moved quickly to publicly accuse Moore and, while an independent panel ultimately found that Moore had proven, on a balance of probabilities, that contaminated meat was the source of her positive test, the ITIA nevertheless appealed and the CAS reversed, finding that Moore had not met her burden on the balance of probabilities. The CAS reasoned that Moore was required to prove that the meat she ate was contaminated, and not merely that it was the most logical source of the banned substance under the circumstances. The CAS upheld the ITIA’s preferred four-year ban, effectively ending Moore’s career.
Moore has now sued in the Southern District of New York to vacate the subsequent American Arbitration Association award against her. In that award, the arbitrator essentially appropriated the CAS findings as a basis to estop Moore’s negligence claim against the Women’s Tennis Association for failure to warn her of the potential for meat contamination in Colombia, thereby relying on the CAS ruling to, in effect, bar Moore from asserting a civil claim that was never before the CAS. Indeed, Moore’s case would never even have made it to the CAS at all but for the ITIA’s decision to appeal the reasonably-calculated independent tribunal’s finding that had exonerated her.
Consequences of the magnitude suffered by Halep and Moore should be imposed only after the most fair, sensible and structured of legal processes. While neither Halep nor Moore enjoyed the benefit of that kind of process, her colleagues have them to thank for the more favorable (and less convoluted) treatment they will undoubtedly receive in the future.
Case in point: Men’s World No. 1 Jannik Sinner.
The Sinner and Swiatek Cases
On March 10, 2024, Sinner submitted two in-competition urine samples at the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, both of which tested positive for the anabolic steroid clostebol. Sinner provided a third urine sample on March 18, which also tested positive for clostebol. On April 4, the ITIA notified Sinner that he was provisionally suspended, effective immediately, to which Sinner submitted an emergency application to lift the suspension based on his team having identified the source of the clostebol contamination.
The wheels of justice turned quickly for Sinner.
His provisional ban was lifted almost immediately, as was a second, imposed on April 17 on the basis of the second failed test. The ITIA formally charged Sinner in May of 2024 and Sinner responded by arguing in submissions to the ITIA that the clostebol contamination was a function of his skin condition, psoriasiform dermatitis—that the clostebol was an undisclosed ingredient of an over-the-counter spray called Trofodermin, readily available in Sinner’s native Italy, which had absorbed into Sinner’s porous skin during treatment sessions.
It bears noting that when traces of clostebol were found in the urine samples of then world No. 760 Stefano Battaglino, he argued, just as Sinner did, that the steroid had been an ingredient in a spray or cream that a tournament physiotherapist had used on him during an in-match medical timeout. Battaglino’s attempts to contact the physiotherapist—his only means of proving by a “balance of the probabilities” that he had not doped—were ignored and the ITIA imposed a four-year ban, which was upheld by the independent tribunal and, subsequently, CAS. Without the resources to mount a substantial defense, Battaglino is next eligible to play in 2027, by which time he’ll have missed four years of competition.
Unsurprisingly, Sinner’s case reached a far different outcome.
Substantially the same defense that Halep (and Moore) had offered—accidental contamination through exposure to or ingestion of an undisclosed ingredient in a non-banned substance—became the basis for the ITIA’s acquittal of Sinner. And on August 20, 2024, news of Sinner having ever failed a drug test was first revealed to the public.
WADA intervened, appealing to CAS, arguing that the ITIA’s finding that Sinner bore no fault was untenable and that a minimum one-year suspension was in order, ultimately settling with Sinner on a three-month ban. That deal followed a private hearing at CAS.
The ITIA was similarly cautious when Women’s No. 1 Iga Swiatek tested positive for Trimetazaidine (TMZ), a medication used to treat angina, but which increases oxygen use efficiency by encouraging glucose oxidation. Therefore, while not classified as a steroid, TMZ is a WADA-banned substance.
Again, the wheels of justice turned especially quickly for Swiatek.
Swiatek argued that a non-prescription sleep medication, manufactured and regulated in her native Poland, was the source of the TMZ. The provisional suspension imposed by the ITIA on September 22, 2024 was lifted on October 4, with Swiatek agreeing to a one-month suspension.
ITIA CEO Karen Moore said, at the time, that “[o]nce the source had been established, it became clear that this was a highly unusual instance of a contaminated product, which in Poland is a regulated medicine.” More “unusual” than Halep’s “instance of a contaminated product”? Moore was never asked and never volunteered an opinion.
Conclusion
Many of the world’s top players have cried foul at the leniency with which Sinner and Swiatek were treated, initially by the ITIA, and the degree to which the ITIA and the professional tours went to keep the charges against them from the public eye. From a legal perspective, the more compelling take-away is that the obvious procedural and substantive shortcomings that attended to Simona Halep’s charging and prosecution seem to have made the ITIA more cautious about imposing destructive consequences in the absence of firmly corroborating evidence, at least when it comes to top-ranked players. Time will tell whether that same benefit will extend to all tennis professionals.
Alex Talel is an attorney and legal commentator who served as a federal law clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
