International Tennis Integrity Agency v. Irina Fetecău

Irina Fetecău tested positive for the stimulant 4-Methylpentan-2-amine after a tournament in Florianópolis, Brazil, in April 2024. She traced it to a pre-workout product called "Gorillalpha Yeti Juice" that didn't list the stimulant as an ingredient, and had it independently tested at a WADA-accredited laboratory in Seibersdorf, Austria. That testing found the product genuinely was contaminated — though notably, when several units of the same product were tested, only three of four actually contained the substance, meaning she could easily have tested a clean unit herself beforehand and still ended up with a contaminated one in competition. The independent tribunal (Sport Resolutions decision SR/014/2025, 25 April 2025) also credited her for taking a genuine mitigating step before her positive test: she had consulted a qualified sports physician about the supplement's safety beforehand.

Both sides appealed the first-instance panel's 10-month sanction, in opposite directions. Fetecău argued the ban should be shorter, given how genuinely unavoidable the contamination was. The ITIA cross-appealed for a full 12 months, the sanction it had originally proposed before the player rejected a settlement on those terms.

CAS Sole Arbitrator Jeffrey G. Benz, hearing the linked appeals as CAS 2025/A/11425 (Fetecău's own appeal) and CAS 2025/A/11544 (the ITIA's cross-appeal), sided with neither extreme, confirming 10 months as the right balance. On the ITIA's push for a harsher sanction, the panel was unusually direct about what was actually at stake: it noted that pushing her sanction from 10 to 12 months wouldn't just be a technical adjustment, but would knock her out of the WTA rankings entirely and make it practically impossible for her to return to competition afterward — treating that real-world consequence as a reason the extra two months wasn't justified on these facts, not just a number to be reasoned about in the abstract.

The panel's own summary of the case captured the distinction it was drawing: Fetecău "is not a cheater, but did not live up to her duty of care in preventing her ingestion of the Prohibited Substance," and ten months was the appropriate sanction for that lower-level failure — genuinely different from, and less serious than, deliberate doping.