After the best hour of tennis she ever played, Simona Halep dropped to her knees and beamed at her box in disbelief. The Romanian had just bamboozled and outclassed the greatest female tennis player in the modern game in the 2019 Wimbledon final, in doing so claiming her second Grand Slam title. She hit just three unforced errors in the entire match and a sentence rarely uttered came to mind: Serena Williams was powerless.
It felt like a seismic moment, not just for Halep but for women’s tennis and the next generation behind the Williams sisters. In her prime years at 27, Halep reclaimed her world No 1 ranking and her ceiling seemed limitless.
But five years on, as Halep waved goodbye to professional tennis on Tuesday after a 6-1, 6-1 thrashing by world No 72 Lucia Bronzetti at her home tournament, her legacy is a complicated one.
“I don’t know if it’s with joy or sadness, I think both feelings are trying me but I’m making this decision with my soul,” Halep said, as she announced her decision to retire on court at the Transylvania Open.
“Where I probably was, it’s very hard to get there and I know what it means to get there. It’s a beautiful thing. I became world number one, I won grand slams, it’s all I wanted. Life goes on, there is life after tennis and I hope that we will see each other again.”
Halep is speaking after a tempestuous two-and-a-half years which was spent mostly away from the tennis court. In October 2022, the Romanian was provisionally suspended by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) after testing positive for the banned substance Roxadustat, the blood-boosting anaemia drug, at the 2022 US Open.
Irregularities were also found in her biological passport – the testing system used to establish an athlete’s blood profile over several years – with “suspicious” results in the 2022 season.
Nearly a year later, Halep was banned for four years but an appeal last February in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) reduced the ban to nine months, as CAS ruled Halep “on the balance of probabilities” had not taken Roxadustat on purpose. The Romanian has always insisted she did not take the drug intentionally, with her former coach Patrick Mouratoglou taking the blame for adding a collagen supplement to her nutrition plan in the summer of 2022.
“This collagen happened to be contaminated,” he said, in November 2023.
“I feel responsible for what happened because it’s my team – so me, basically – who brought her this collagen.”
Throughout the whole saga, Halep had been incandescent, describing it as “the hardest match” of her life. In the end, it was a situation where a route back to the top quickly became unfeasible.
Whichever way you look at it, it has been a lamentable conclusion to a career Halep could only dream of when training as a teenager in the coastal town of Constanta, on the shores of the Black Sea.
There was her first WTA title in 2013 on her favoured clay in Nuremberg, which was quickly followed by five more titles in the same year. Halep was in the top-10 for 373 consecutive weeks from 2014-2021, emerging as one of women’s tennis’ most consistent players, omnipresent in the latter stages of the world’s biggest tournaments.
Yet her early 20s did not come without heartbreak. After blowing a set and a break advantage in the 2017 French Open final to unseeded teenager Jelena Ostapenko – her third defeat in a Grand Slam final – there were question marks around whether Halep would ever reach the pinnacle of professional tennis.
But a year later, in the same setting on Court Philippe-Chatrier, Halep this time came from a set and a break down to beat Sloane Stephens in the final to claim her first major. Her relief at reaching her Everest was felt across the game.
That sensational 56-minute hot-streak of stunning athleticism and exceptional defensive skills on Centre Court in 2019 would follow for major No 2. But those highest of highs did not translate into all-court dominance standing the test of time. In fact, she would never reach another Grand Slam final.
She was blighted by Covid in 2020 and then came the spate of injuries in 2021 which, ultimately, she has never recovered from. Her final title came in August 2022, with a WTA 1000 victory in Toronto. A few weeks later, she would test positive for Roxadustat.
Despite being cleared to play a year ago – and returning to the tour with a wild card in Miami – constant pain in her knee would not disappear. An exhibition event in Abu Dhabi in December saw her experience shoulder pain, too, and the writing looked on the wall when she withdrew from Australian Open qualifying last month.
However, she can take solace in that she managed to finish with one final appearance in her homeland, where she is revered as the greatest Romanian tennis player since Ilie Nastase in the 1970s. Halep’s achievements, including 24 WTA titles and 64 weeks at world No 1, are awe-inspiring.
Yet in a period where Grand Slam champions Jannik Sinner and Iga Swiatek have also tested positive for banned substances, the Romanian’s own ordeal cannot be ignored when discussing her career and has been a bad look for the sport in general. Halep’s highs were extraordinary – and none were better than that all-time Wimbledon final performance on the grass of SW19.
But her legacy now is convoluted; tangled up in a murky final two years.
