Halep, who won the French Open in 2018 and Wimbledon the following year, tested positive for the banned substance roxadustat after losing her US Open first-round match on August 29 this year.

But now, according to ProSport, the Laboratoire Antidopage Français (LADF), employed by Halep, has identified the sources of contamination claimed to have led to the adverse finding.

The technical results of this investigation into the nutritional products taken by Halep attested to a minimal presence of roxadustat - which is not specified on the product label.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) sends very clear messages warning athletes against the use of supplements and products that may contain prohibited substances.

But the French report claims information about roxadustat presence in supplements is not accessible through a reasonable search on the internet utilising the online identification engines provided by WADA for finding prohibited products possibly existing in nutritional supplements.

Halep reportedly returned a negative sample in a test carried out in Bucharest immediately after returning from New York.

If the results of the French analysis stand up Halep will have become one of the latest in a long line elite athletes who have incurred anti-doping proceedings through unreliable supplements.

But it is a longstanding principle of anti-doping that an athlete is held responsible for what is in their sample regardless of how it got there or whether they knew about it.