MELBOURNE, Australia – Under the willpower, professional tennis normally increased this week with a spate of events in a country that has managed to almost suffocate the coronavirus.
The three tournaments and the ATP Cup, in which players compete for their countries, have turned Melbourne’s men’s park into a sea of matches with the gates for spectators. Hundreds of matches are planned this week at the tennis complex, on the banks of the Yarra River, just a few hundred meters up a hill from the city center. The smaller events lead to the Australian Open, the centerpiece of the summer tennis season here, which starts on Monday.
The organizers of the Australian Open on Wednesday gave a serious reminder of the public health challenge a hotel quarantine worker tested positive for the virus. It set up on Thursday that the game had been suspended and that everyone involved in the tennis events at the hotel should isolate themselves in their rooms until they pass a negative test.
The positive test put an end to a 28-day run of zero community distribution in the state of Victoria, reports The Age, a Melbourne newspaper. The Australian Open, the first Grand Slam tournament of the year, was not immediately affected, but the positive test made it clear that the event – with all its planning and precautions – could be lifted if more people became infected.
Before the latest setback, the word ‘lucky’ still flew out of the mouths of players – fortunately their sport coincidentally began its year in an isolated island nation that decided months ago that it would do almost anything to spread the coronavirus. The federal and state governments specifically allowed more than a thousand people to travel from abroad for the tournament, which required them to serve 14 days in varying degrees of lockdown to reduce the risk of bringing Covid-19 back into the community, to reduce. For the players, it was the forerunner to compete for more than $ 80 million in prize money for all the events.
And yet, the massive effort to hold these competitions has illuminated an unpleasant truth for a sport that normally shoots through the world for 11 months every year. No one knows exactly what will happen to professional tennis for the rest of 2021 when the competitions in Australia are over at the end of the month.
The problem is that two of the key ingredients to successful tennis are open international borders and large crowds in large cities, which are currently not in abundance.
There are tournaments on the calendar everywhere, from the Middle East to South America and Florida, but it is advised by someone how this can happen, which requires officials in the countries of all who want to enter their borders, or or players capable is to travel freely in and out of their own countries.
“Everything is constantly evolving,” said Johanna Konta of Britain, a member of the WTA Players’ Council, when asked recently what the rest of the year looks like for her and her sport. “I do not know what it’s going to be like. I do not know what the quarantines will be like. I do not know how things are going to take shape. ”
With this week’s tuneup events slipping into the schedule and moving from their usual places elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand to Melbourne, attendance was scarce, but a stream of enthusiastic fans streamed in every day – especially the indigenous Serbs shouting for Novak Djokovic. A player strikes a huge shot and a roar echoes through the courts, just as it was supposed to. Players go through their usual routine of workouts, matches and massages, plus meals and coffee dates among locals in the city’s restaurants.
Getting to this point took months of negotiations with government officials, tens of millions of dollars, 17 charter planes to fly the players and other essential tennis workers to the country, and employed hundreds of people to manage the two-week quarantine. The payout will take place next week when 30,000 fans a day will be split into three zones to limit the exposure of each person to someone who can test positive.
“In Europe, it’s going to be a lot more challenging to experience something we’re experiencing here,” said Djokovic, the world’s no. 1 and the leader of a budding players’ association, said. “We can enjoy it just as much as we can.”
Andrea Gaudenzi, president of the Association of Tennis Professionals, said this Tuesday night: “We live in the now.”
However, Australia also had its problems. After ten people tested positive on three flights, health officials ordered 72 players to close a tough 14-day period. This means that players who expected to exercise, train and be outside for up to five hours every day had to stay in their hotel rooms, even if they would have tested negative for the coronavirus.
Tennis Australia CEO Craig Tiley held teleconferences with the players every day for up to two hours. The conversations sometimes became belligerent and included in-depth discussions about how tennis could function the rest of the year. Would France and Britain follow Australia’s lead and require similarly long quarantine periods for players if they try to hold the French Open and Wimbledon from late May to mid-July?
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose national health service has wilted under the treatment of Covid-19 patients, has moved to require ten-day hotel quarantines for people arriving from more than 20 countries where new variants of the virus pose a risk.
“I don’t think a lot of people will come if it’s a two-week hard lock,” Tiley said.
Gaudenzi, the ATP chairman, said the tours are trying to figure out how to get players from event to event while complying with national rules for international arrivals. He said players might just have to play a little less. Playing in one country on one Tuesday and in another country the following Monday may be impossible.
Players may have to travel to one continent and stay there for two months – Europe starts in the spring, North America in the summer. But it does have complications for players who have families, as the tour now has a limit on how many people players can travel.
“There is no perfect answer,” Gaudenzi said. “The key word is flexibility – and a lot of patience.”
Naomi Osaka, the three-time Grand Slam champion, said on Sunday that she would not play again after Australia before the Miami Open, which is expected to start at the end of March.
“You have to plan your tournaments more because you do not know what is going to happen,” Osaka said. “It’s a kind of thought process that everyone is currently experiencing.”
Many top players were looking forward to the Olympics this summer in Tokyo, where officials are determined to continue. The Olympics offer a great opportunity for tennis to be a showcase in front of casual fans, but Rafael Nadal, the 20-time Grand Slam champion, said it would be very difficult for professional tennis to have a long quarantine for the Combine Olympic Games with tour schedules. .
All the players can do, according to him, is “follow the people who know about the virus and protect the people in every country, just follow their instructions.”
It gets a lot harder later this month, when tennis leaves Australia and its guaranteed payday for the uncertainty of the rest of the year.
“I do not know,” Serena Williams said when asked how much tennis she thought she would play this year. “It’s very difficult to say. Everything looks good so far, but it’s winter in the rest of the world. ”