Simona Halep's appeal for an accelerated hearing on her doping saga finds sympathy from Daria Saville

Australian tennis player Daria Saville leapt to Simona Halep's defense, who is undergoing a provisional suspension for testing positive for a banned substance since late last year.

Halep recently opened up about her frustrating wait for a hearing with the Tribunal, currently scheduled for May 28 and still not guaranteed to take place. The former World No. 1 lamented that she doesn't understand why she has had to spend almost eight months on the sidelines without even getting a shot at justice.

Saville took to Twitter to sympathize with Halep by acknowledging that this was a stressful time for the Romanian tennis player.

"The feeling of unknown is terrifying, I can’t imagine how stressful this is for Simona," she tweeted.

Saville further added that she hoped that the two-time Grand Slam champion would not have to wait long for a judgment on the issue.

"I really hope that Simo doesn’t have to wait too much longer and she can get judged so she can move forward," she added in the same tweet.

Simona Halep suspended for eight months for testing positve for Roxadustat

Simona Halep at the 2022 US Open.

Simona Halep was handed a provisional suspension by the International Tennis Integrity Agency for testing positive for Roxadustat in October 2022, soon after her first-round exit from the US Open.

In her recent interview, the 31-year-old opined that the intake of the banned substance could have happened through "supplement contamination" -- an explanation given to her by the independent experts she contracted to help her understand the situation.

"I’ve always been careful to check all the components from the supplements [I take] to make sure that everything is authorised. I had no clue at the beginning about where this substance came from. And then I just wanted to ask the experts to explain to me how this happened and where it was coming from," she said in a video interview.

"As I said, I had never heard about it so I didn’t know how I could take it, and actually how it could be in my urine. After a lot of work, they found out that there was a contamination, a supplement contamination, and that’s why the quantity was so so low in my body," she added.

Simona Halep further revealed in the interview that since the announcement of her provisional suspension, she has been tested 10 times - all of which have come back negative.