Fans angry with Patrick Mouratoglou: "He destroyed Simona Halep's name"



by LORENZO CIOTTI

Fans angry with Patrick Mouratoglou: "He destroyed Simona Halep's name"
Fans angry with Patrick Mouratoglou: "He destroyed Simona Halep's name" © Julian Finney / Staff Getty Images Sport

Patrick Mouratoglou admitted his responsibility and his involvement in the doping issue that affected Simona Halep, but his words met the anger from the fans. Many users on X have in fact left very harsh messages against the French coach.

Halep tested positive for Roxadustat at the 2022 US Open and since then she has not played a single official match: a year later, the Romanian tennis player was disqualified for four years. Some users went so far as to say how Mouratoglou never stopped being Serena Williams' coach and destroyed Simona Halep's name.

Fans angry with Patrick Mouratoglou: "He destroyed Simona Halep's name"

Patrick Mouratoglou, in a video published on Instagram, explained: "I feel confident for the future of Simona Halep with her appeal to the CAS because it is an independent tribunal.

We have been able to establish where the contamination comes from. So we proposed her to take collagen and we brought her collagen from a company. This collagen happened to be contaminated, there was no way to know it. But I feel responsible for what happened because it's my team.

So it's me basically who brought her this collagen. We have done all possible tests to establish that we are talking about a contamination. I'm very confident that this independent tribunal will recognize that she never did doping, she was a victim, and she has to come back to the court and compete as soon as possible.

It opened my eyes on the fact that any athlete can become contaminated tomorrow because apparently this happens more and more. We're talking about extremely low levels of something. It has zero effect, but you happen to have in your system something that shouldn't be there.

Your career is stopped for a period of time that is extremely long. It can affect your whole career, it affects your reputation for a very unfair reason because you have done nothing. The companies that you decide to go with for supplements, you have to be sure at 100% that this cannot happen." Below you can read some of the harshest comments shared by users on X:

Patrick Mouratoglou Simona Halep Serena Williams