"I have no regrets and every mistake I did, I assume it and I accept it": Simona Halep at peace with retirement amid previous doping scandal

Simona Halep stepped onto court nine months ago for the last time and as injuries took their toll, the former World No.1 had come to the realisation that the end was near as she played the Transylvania Open in Cluj-Napoca.

While others have a bit of a tour and retire e.g Angelique Kerber at the Olympics, Petra Kvitova at the US Open she was one of two recent attendees at the WTA Finals who suddenly called time after one final match without anyone particularly knowing it was the end.

Garbine Muguruza was another who played a match in Lyon against Linda Noskova which she lost. She promptly took a break from the sport and never came back. She is now tournament director at the WTA Finals in Riyadh. But while she never said she was coming back, like Halep she finally decided she wouldn't comeback.

No farewell tour for Halep who had spent most of the prior 18 months almost vilified from the tennis community for her doping ban for Roxudustat, a substance given to her while with her previous coach Patrick Mouratoglou. But she emerged into the spotlight also again when Jannik Sinner and Iga Swiatek suddenly tested positive for substances and she was seen perhaps as getting a rough deal given her career was in limbo for 18 months.

On return she wasn't the same player and couldn't get wildcards to events and the ones she could were very much a tedious exercise in knowing she perhaps wasn't fit enough to play anymore with injuries constantly cropping up. Not the same player as when she left the sport, she summed up her decision.

“I thought about it for a while, but it was not decided when I entered the court that in that match I would retire. But I felt like my place is not there any more,” Halep told The National in Riyadh.

“I felt physically, I was injured with my knee and I was in pain. So after I lost the first set, I made up my mind and I said, ‘I'm going to stop after this’. And then I went to my parents and I told them that I want to stop. And they said, ‘OK, announce it’. So the story was like this. Nobody knew.”

Despite what happened to Halep, she also harbours no resentment towards the sport that gave her everything in her view and that she owns the mistakes that she made hinting at the doping scandal albeit whether she misses tennis is a fluid situation. She has no plans to return at all but says she still gets goosebumps and the feeling as if she's playing without all of the playing it entails.

“Tennis did nothing to me, nothing wrong. It did only good things,” she says. “What happened, it was just, for me, without doing any mistakes. So everything was proved. Tennis has nothing to do with that and I still keep the passion for it. I miss [tennis] a little bit and I had goosebumps when I entered the centre court, remembering everything that I was playing,” she admits. “But it's good also without the stress of playing matches.”

“I have no regrets and every mistake I did, I assume it and I accept it. And all the good things that I did, I'm proud of,” she declared.

“I can say I'm proud of many things, but the main thing is the way I managed all the failures and the successes. Because when you grow up from a little country, the big success, you don't really know all the time how to manage it. And I feel like I managed it very well and I didn't change much. So I think this, I'm the proudest of.”

“Because now I realise that I dedicated my whole life to this. I have some emotional gaps on the normal life, but I don't regret. So these things were very important for me to just give myself to this sport,” she added. “I relax because I felt very tired when I took the decision. And I feel like my body has to just chill and do nothing. So I'm doing that."

She also added about the state of Saudi Arabian tennis being there in an ambassadorial role and that she sees a big growth within 10 years for a sport where she anchored a nation in Romania among the likes of Sorana Cirstea but only took one for an avalanche of rising names.

“Well, it's improving a lot more. And here, what they're doing, it's really, really nice and impressive,” she said in Riyadh.

“It's going to help the region to improve in tennis. And I'm sure that more kids will come and more kids will have the desire because they need to feel it to be a professional tennis player.

“It's not easy, but they have all the facilities and I feel like it's going to improve in 10 years. I was talking this morning that in 10 years, I feel like here is going to be huge.”