PARIS– Iga Swiatek provided a simple explanation of why he requested that the French Open not put it on the agenda during one of your evening sessions, which often turn into sessions well after midnight.
“I just like it,” the number 1 player in the ranking explained, “sleep normally”.
Catching the right amount of z is no easy task in Grand Slam tennis these days, for athletes or those who watch them compete. Current players, former players and those who run the sport tend to agree that it is not ideal to continue until the early hours of the morning, something that happens continuously.
The most recent example is the current champion Novak Djokovic’s five-set victory at Roland Garros against Lorenzo Musetti, a dispute that started after 10:30 pm on Saturday and only ended after 3 am on Sunday.
It’s not good for the players. Either the fans present or trying to follow from afar. Or the stadium workers. Or the court staff. The biggest problem? No one can get on the same page when it comes to finding a solution.
“It’s a complicated thing” US Open Champion Coco Gauff said Sunday. “But I definitely think that for the health and safety of the players, it would be in the best interests of the sport to try to prevent these matches from ending – or starting – after a certain time. Obviously, you can’t control when they break up.”
There are those who argue that there should be a curfew everywhere, in the same way that Wimbledon stops the action at 11pm – and others who feel that this is not practical for television purposes or for players who would rather just finish what they started.
There are those who propose starting the day’s sessions before 11am or noon in the main stadiums – and others who believe that players would prefer not to be there in the morning, a time when few sports take place, while spectators and those organizing events can object too.
There are those who suggest that men should play best-of-three sets rather than best-of-five matches – and others who stick to the longer format creates additional drama and is essential to the allure of major tournaments.
On the other hand, as Swiatek noted: “I don’t know if the fans are watching these games if they have to go to work the next day or something like that when the games end at 2 or 3 in the morning.”
During the French Open, which started on May 26th and ends on June 9th, one of the obstacles was the weather: Showers on five consecutive daysincluding Saturday, wreaked havoc on the schedule.
“There are many factors that go into these things. Solutions are difficult because you have to put yourself in everyone’s shoes,” said Jim Courier, who won two of his four major trophies at the French Open in the early 1990s. “So you pick your poison. There are no good answers when it rains so much.”
One of the reasons Djokovic vs. Musetti started so late in the evening was that it was preceded by another third round match that was supposed to be completed on Friday but was suspended, so it was moved to the Philippe Chatrier Court to take advantage. its retractable roof.
“Some things could have been handled differently,” said Djokovic, 37, who is seeking a record 25th career Grand Slam single title. “There’s also beauty, I think, in winning the match… at 3:30 – if it’s the last one of the tournament. But not that. So I will have to turn on all my young genes and try to recover as quickly as possible.”
The group he co-founded to support tennis athletes, the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA), has been trying to draw attention to the need for a way to get around the early morning madness.
“It is certainly a health problem for the player. It’s also a fan and spectator problem. This also means a business issue,” PTPA Executive Director Ahmad Nassar said on Sunday. “It’s also a question of representation.”
The WTA and ATP professional tournaments said in January that the number of matches ending after midnight had “increased considerably in recent years.” getting them to test new rules which governs late sessions.
However, this does not apply to Slams.
“Individually, we all study our event and monitor game times and: How big of a problem is it, really? There are certainly outliers and exceptions all the time. Look, we continue studying and looking for creative solutions. But if there were easy, obvious choices, we would all have fallen in line,” said Lew Sheer, CEO of the US Tennis Association, the organization that runs the US Open.
“If there are adjustments we can make to improve it, we will certainly consider and review them,” Sheer said. “But I don’t think there’s anything definitive coming this year.”
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Howard Fendrich has been an AP tennis writer since 2002. Find his stories here: https://apnews.com/author/howard-fendrich
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