![]() ![]() No matter what I say I will be hated until the rest of my life, especially by very aggressive Novak fans. It doesn't matter who you are, nobody is allowed to do it. I don't know what the rules are, I don't know what the tournament is allowed to do, but this kind of thing can't be left unseen. One day perhaps, but certainly not Sunday.Ukrainian tennis player Marta Kostyuk admitted it was upsetting to see Novak Djokovic's father posing alongside pro-Russian supporters but refused to say anything negative about Djokovic or his father because the Serb "has very aggressive fans."After Djokovic defeated Andrey Rublev in the Australian Open quarterfinal, his father Srdjan was filmed posing alongside a man wearing Russia's ultra-nationalist "Z" war symbol on his shirt and holding a Russian flag with Vladimir Putin's face. It was refreshing, she said, and it made her think that a day would come when a war would no longer intrude on her chosen occupation, that every tennis match would be nothing more and nothing less than that. To her surprise, she said, for the first time since the start of the war ahead of a match against a Russian or Belarusian, she was not focused on the nationality of her opponent. ![]() She said she tried not to look at her phone in the overnight hours, but when she saw all the alerts she could not stop the urge to see what had happened.Ī few hours later, she was at Roland Garros preparing for her match with Sabalenka. Sunday and saw a series of alerts on her phone about the latest drone attack on Kyiv, the largest of the war. She said she still has not recovered from the trip. ![]() She spent five days there, struggling to sleep amid the distant sounds of bomb-carrying drones that her relatives have somehow learned to live with. The journey required four flights to get to Poland by way of her temporary home in Monte Carlo, a two-and-a-half-hour train ride to the border, and then a six-hour car ride. Kostyuk last visited Ukraine in March to see her father and grandfather. “I think they will not feel really nice about what they did.” “I want to see people react to it in 10 years when the war is over,” she said. Anhelina Kalinina of Ukraine, whose grandparents had to leave their home and whose parents’ home was bombed, will play Diane Parry of France on Tuesday in her first match after her emotional run to the Italian Open final this month. On Monday, Elina Svitolina, among the most successful players Ukraine has produced, will make her Grand Slam return from maternity leave, against Martina Trevisan of Italy. The rousing roars whenever a French player was in action echoed across the grounds as loudly as they ever have.Īs Kostyuk and Sabalenka made clear, though, the war may very well make this tournament and tennis summer unlike any before it. But as Nadal has said, tennis moves fast and waits for no one. The absence of the injured star Rafael Nadal, whose record 14 men’s singles titles have made him synonymous with this event, is weirding everyone out. There is no red like the red of the clay courts of Roland Garros, no crowd that looks as effortlessly elegant as this one: the Panama hats, the silk spring dresses, the aperol spritzes in fancy glasses in seemingly every other hand. It is often one of the most joyous days in tennis, especially with the sky sparkling with that special shade of bright Parisian blue. The tension on Sunday was in stark contrast to the otherwise celebratory feel of the first day of the French Open. The moves have left players from Ukraine unsatisfied and players from Russia and Belarus feeling like pariahs. (Belarus has provided a staging ground for Russian soldiers, and its leader has said the country would join the war if attacked.)īelarus and Russia have been banned from team tennis competitions, and their flags and country names have been banished from the sport. Fifteen months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war shows no end in sight. The impact of the war in Ukraine on tennis has been constant and never-ending. ![]()
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