By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Saturday July 20, 2024
Simona Halep’s comeback to the WTA Tour is in a holding pattern due to a lingerning knee issue. The Romanian took to social media on Friday to update her status.
The Romanian, who has played just two matches since her comeback commenced with a return to the tour at the Miami Open, says she needs time to get healthy, and will not rush a return to the court.
“For a few months now, I have been struggling with a knee injury,” Halep wrote in an Instagram post. “It’s an injury I have never had before and it has been a tough one to manage, with the pain persisting.”
The former World No.1, currently ranked 1127, played a tour-level match for the first time since the 2022 US Open at Miami in March. She then retired from her match with American McCartney Kessler at a 125K event in Paris in May.
On March 5, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) reduced Halep’s doping ban from four years to nine months, which allowed her comeback to commence. The CAS eventually ruled that Halep’s anti-doping rule violations were not intentional.
The two-time major champion says she has been through a lot in the last few years, and indicates that she is unwilling to put her mental or physical health at risk at the moment.
“It has been a very difficult period (almost two years) mentally and emotionally for me and struggling physically on top of that definitely doesn’t help. I have decided to take the time needed to recover properly, rather than training and playing through pain,” she wrote. “My instinct has always been to try to come back as soon as possible, but I am not a machine, I am a human being and I need time to recover from everything I have gone through.”
