Reactions to tennis player Simona Halep’s ban poured in. There was sadness, outrage and farewells from colleagues. Including Serena Williams’s confusing X line.
Seven-time Wimbledon singles champion Serena Williams wrote on X, “8 is a better number” when the decision to ban Simona Halep was made.
Accordingly, tennis fans can understand that Serena is aiming for her 24th Grand Slam title and her 8th championship at Wimbledon. At Wimbledon, Serena lost to Halep in the 2019 Wimbledon final.
It must be said that the 23-time Grand Slam champion has reached many finals and Wimbledon 2019 is her opportunity to equal Margaret Court’s all-time record of 24 titles, ahead of Novak Djokovic. However, Serena had to put her dream on hold before Halep.
Halep owns two Grand Slam titles, Roland Garros 2018 and Wimbledon 2019. The Romanian tennis player received a positive test result for the banned substance roxadustat at the 2022 US Open.
Later, she was also found to have abnormalities in the athlete’s biological passport after 51 blood samples were analyzed.
Roxadustat is a substance used legally to treat anemia, but is on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned list because it is considered a doping agent that increases hemoglobin and red blood cell production.
According to the latest information from the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA), former world No. 1 tennis player Simona Halep was banned from competition for 4 years for two intentional violations of anti-doping rules. Halep announced that she would appeal the penalty and take the case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
This is considered the heaviest ban decision in tennis since the case of Maria Sharapova. The famous former Russian tennis player was banned from competition for 15 months after testing positive for meldonium.
At that time, Sharapova received a lot of support from fans and colleagues when she used meldonium without knowing it was banned. Serena Williams also sided with her arch-rival and supported it when Sharapova called the two-year ban “extremely harsh”.
After Sharapova appealed, her initial two-year ban was reduced to 15 months.
In Halep’s case, the verdict was even harsher. However, there was not much support for her before this ban.
