It is increasingly difficult for a sport to escape the tentacles of business. The denaturalization of an activity as noble as sports is increasingly distorted a little more, especially in everything that has to do with the elite, something that has been criticized so much in recent times and that even causes a certain rejection on the part of the viewer.
The organizations that preside and rule in certain sports have seen the goose that lays the golden eggs in their activities, and that is why they insist on overexploiting their product to unsuspected limits. It has happened with football, which already has a calendar in which it is impossible to find free dates, and the latest to join this trend is tennis.
The sport of the racket, with the ATP in charge, has undergone certain changes this season that have already caused complaints from the actors themselves, the tennis players. The obsession with the search for business and raising more and more money threatens to kill the ecosystem and to destroy its main protagonists, the athletes.
Rafa Nadal, after his injury at the Australian Open Reuters
Larger tournaments, an increasingly longer calendar that forces players to select their appearances, games at ungodly hours and with hardly any audience in the stands or the change of balls in each tournament are some of the factors that are killing little by little to tennis.
Tournaments last longer
Tennis is one of the hardest sports precisely because of its calendar. Tennis players are used to playing a high number of matches in a very short period of time, often without being able to rest more than a few hours between matches.
This pushes their bodies to the limit and ends up leaving bodies worn out over time, as has been seen in cases of Rafael Nadal and of Roger Federer, who have reached the final stretch of their sports careers completely crushed.
[Carlos Alcaraz, a la conquista del mercado asiático tras cuatro años sin tenis en China]
Los Masters 1,000 They used to last a week on the calendar, while each Grand Slam It occupied a period of two weeks since the team welcomed many more players. However, this is no longer entirely the case after the latest ATP changes for this season.
Up to three 1,000 Masters have extended their duration in 2023 and have gone from seven to twelve days of competition. The ‘guinea pigs’ in this sense have been the tournaments of Madrid, Rome and the current Shanghai ATP, in China. These tournaments have occupied a longer place on the calendar than usual and have caused some readjustments in the tennis players’ plans, some of them precisely before a Grand Slam.
The night games
Other major complaints that players have expressed publicly and insistently this year have been the night schedules of some games. The case was especially bloody in the Australian Openthe first Grand Slam of the season, where some matches were played in the wee hours of the morning.
Several tennis players raised their voices, especially some with a lot of weight within the circuit like the veteran Andy Murray. The Scot was on the court at four in the morning playing a match in the Australian tournament, something he understood as a lack of respect not only towards him, but towards the ball boys and the public. He thus expressed it openly.
Novak Djokovic, in the final of Wimbledon 2023 Reuters
In fact, this issue became a serious topic of debate since the stands at that time were empty on the tracks as expected. If tennis, like any sport, is a spectacle that is made for the public, it seems that it did not make much sense to have matches playing at those ungodly hours.
Some tournaments like Roland Garros They were held until very recently while natural light lasted, although little by little the French tournament has been losing its essence in that aspect and has implemented artificial light in its facilities. Thus, the night shift was born, which also took matches until the last hours of the day.
New balls in each tournament
Players feel increasingly unprotected by the ATP, the body that governs tennis and that should ensure the good condition of its main actors. However, there is another element that has raised complaints from athletes and that also has to do with the main element of their work, the balls they play with.
Now there are new balls in each tournament and that is a real headache for tennis players. Every week, athletes find that they have to adapt not only to a specific playing surface, which goes with the profession, but also to the touch and bounce of balls that offer different benefits.
[Las pelotas, objeto de crítica de los tenistas: “Sin tanto cambio podríamos reducir las lesiones”]
These constant changes of balls cause athletes to force their gestures when hitting them and each training session has to be different to adapt to the bounce. “I’ve had to deal with wrist problems since the start of the American tour because of ball changes. We went through three different balls in three weeks,” he said recently. Taylor Fritz about.
Many of them, in fact, already attribute this constant change of balls to the injuries they suffer: “I thought it was my problem, but I talked to other players and there are more elbow, wrist and shoulder injuries… I think the balls are those responsible,” he said Daniil Medvedev recently.
Djokovic and Medvedev, during the final of the US Open 2023 Reuters
In short, all these changes that the ATP is implementing in the calendar and on the circuit seem to be slowly killing tennis and that they are squeezing the tennis players as much as possible in order to get the maximum economic return from their product. It is true that the prize pool in tournaments has increased, but the excessive accumulation of matches and a season that is increasingly longer threatens to weigh down the athletes’ physiques.
Follow the topics that interest you
2023-10-04 00:32:06
#ATP #business #suffocates #players #scenario #threatens #burst #tennis #players
