"Halep was on record when Sharapova came back": Andy Roddick and Kim Clijsters back Caroline Wozniacki amid Miami Open row

Tennis icons Andy Roddick and Kim Clijsters have backed Caroline Wozniacki amid the row surrounding Simona Halep which saw the pair of friends come to blows at the Miami Open over the doping scandal for the latter.

Halep failed a doping test during the 2022 US Open and was handed a four year ban. She had nearly two years away from the court with CAS overturning the decision and handing her a ban of just nine months. This meant that she could return to action immediately and James Blake acted accordingly handing her a wildcard for the 2024 Miami Open. After previous comments about Maria Sharapova, Halep was criticised while Wozniacki said that she should have to work her up from the bottom with her sentence reduced and not scrapped entirely.

Read also

Simona Halep not 'game-ready' but likely inspired by Miami Open return for French Open clay court tilt says Kim Clijsters

Roddick's view in particular is that Halep shouldn't have responded in the manner she did due to her comments about Sharapova's situation in 2017 in a similar damning vein.

"The thing that throws this thing into a little bit of a weird area is that Halep was on record in 2017 when Sharapova came back after time served and was given a wildcard saying, ‘Absolutely, under no circumstances, you know, someone who has tested positive, should be allowed wildcards’," Roddick told Clijsters on Served with Andy Roddick Podcast.

"When somebody tests positive very strongly for something that is taken because you want to become a better athlete, yes 100 percent I agree with what Caroline says, they need to start from the bottom, work their work up, be clean, get tested often, and work your way back to the top. In Simona’s case, her team made such a big mistake."

"On that point, I’ve a lot of sympathy for her because of misplaced trust. We should know, we should test, we shouldn’t blindly trust, she did and I feel she [Simona Halep] was kind of manipulated a little bit."

"The word intent is weird because you can say, ‘I didn’t dope’, and I think it should be ‘I didn’t intentionally dope’. Because if you test positive, you've taken performance-enhancing drugs."

Read also

Fresh claims come to light in Simona HALEP doping scandal surrounding concentration of Roxudustat in positive sample