MELBOURNE, Australia – By sheer willpower, professional tennis has moved towards normalcy this week, with a flurry of events in a country that has managed to almost smother the coronavirus.
The three tournaments and a men’s team competition called the ATP Cup, in which players compete for their countries, have turned Melbourne Park into a sea of matches with gates open to spectators. Hundreds of matches were scheduled this week at the tennis complex, which sits on the banks of the Yarra River, just a few hundred meters down a hill from the city center. Smaller events lead to the Australian Open, the centerpiece of the summer tennis season here, which is scheduled to start on Monday.
A severe reminder of the public health challenge posed by the events came on Wednesday, when Australian Open organizers said a hotel quarantine worker had tested positive for the virus. This led to a suspension of the game on Thursday and orders for everyone associated with tennis events at the hotel to isolate themselves in their rooms until they return a negative test.
The positive test ended a 28-day series with no community broadcast in Victoria, reported 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 precaution – could be stopped if more people were infected.
Before the last setback, the word “luck” kept flying from players’ lips – lucky that their sport starts the year in an isolated island nation that decided months ago that it would do almost everything it could to limit the spread of the coronavirus. The federal and state governments especially allowed more than 1,000 people to travel abroad for the tournament, requiring them to complete 14 days in varying degrees of blockade to reduce the risk of bringing Covid-19 back to the community. For players, that was the bet to compete for more than $ 80 million in prize money for all events.
However, the enormous effort in holding these competitions illuminated an unpleasant truth for a sport that normally travels the world for 11 months each year. No one knows exactly what will happen to professional tennis until the end of 2021, when competitions in Australia end at the end of the month.
The problem is that two of the main ingredients for tennis success are open international borders and large crowds in big cities, none of which are in abundance at the moment.
There are tournaments on the calendar everywhere, from the Middle East to South America and Florida, but no one guesses how they will take place, which the authorities of those countries will require from anyone who wants to enter their borders or whether players will be able to travel freely inside and outside their own countries.
“Everything is constantly evolving,” said Johanna Konta, from Britain, a member of the WTA players’ council, when asked recently what the rest of the year was like for her and her sport. “I don’t know how it will be. I don’t know what quarantines will be like. I don’t know how things are going to develop. “
With this week’s adjustment events fitted into the schedule and moved to Melbourne from their usual locations elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand, attendance has been sparse, but an influx of enthusiastic fans pass through the gates each day – especially the native Serbs screaming for Novak Djokovic. A player hits an excellent kick and a roar echoes around the court, exactly as it should. Players are going through their usual routines of practice sessions, games and massages, as well as meals and coffee dates between locations in downtown restaurants.
Getting to this point took months of negotiations with government officials, tens of millions of dollars, 17 charter jets to take players and other essential tennis workers to the country and the hiring of hundreds of people to manage the two-week quarantine. The reward will come next week, when the tournament will allow up to 30,000 fans a day, which will be divided into three zones to limit each person’s exposure to someone who can potentially test positive.
“In Europe, I think it will be much more challenging to experience something that we are experiencing here,” said Djokovic, the world’s number one and leader of a nascent player association. “We can very well enjoy as much as we can.”
As Andrea Gaudenzi, president of the Professional Tennis Association, said Tuesday night: “We live in the now”.
Australia, however, also had its difficulties. After 10 people on three flights tested positive, health officials ordered 72 players to undergo a rigid 14-day block. This meant that players who expected to practice, train and be outdoors for up to five hours a day would have to be isolated in their hotel rooms, even if they continued with the negative test for coronavirus.
Craig Tiley, the chief executive of Tennis Australia, held conference calls with players for up to two hours a day. Conversations sometimes became combative and included in-depth discussions about how tennis could work the rest of the year. Would France and Britain follow Australia’s example and demand equally long quarantine periods for players as they try to hold the French Open and Wimbledon from late May to mid-July?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Great Britain, whose National Health Service has been under pressure to treat Covid-19 patients, has now demanded 10-day quarantines in hotels for people arriving from more than 20 countries where new variants of the virus pose a risk.
“I don’t think many people will come if it’s two weeks of rigid blocking,” said Tiley.
Gaudenzi, the president of ATP, said the tournaments are trying to figure out how to take players from one event to another while complying with national rules for international arrivals. He said that players may simply have to play less for a while. Playing in one country on a Tuesday and in another on the following Monday may be impossible.
Players may have to travel to a continent and stay there for two months – Europe starting in the spring, North America in the summer. But this brings complications for players who have family, as the tour now has a limit on how many people players can travel with.
“There is no perfect answer,” said Gaudenzi. “The keyword is flexibility – and a lot of patience.”
Grand Slam three-time champion Naomi Osaka said on Sunday that after Australia she would not play again until the Miami Open, which is scheduled to start in late March.
“You have to plan your tournaments more because you’re not sure what’s going to happen,” said Osaka. “This is the kind of thinking process that everyone has now.”
Many top players were looking forward to the Olympics this summer in Tokyo, where officials remain determined to move on. The Olympics offer a great opportunity for tennis to be a showcase for casual fans, but Rafael Nadal, the 20-time Grand Slam champion, said it would be very difficult for professional tennis to combine a long quarantine for the Olympics with tour schedules.
All players can do, he said, is to follow “the people who know about the virus and how to protect people in each country, just follow their instructions”.
This becomes much more difficult later this month, when tennis leaves Australia and its guaranteed paydays for the rest of the year.
“I don’t know,” said Serena Williams when asked how much tennis she thought she would play this year. “It is very difficult to say. Everything seems fine here so far, but it’s winter in the rest of the world. “