$6m relief fund for about 800 tennis players announced
Spanish club says it mistakenly allowed Djokovic to train
WASHINGTON, May 6, (AP): More than $6 million has been raised by the governing bodies of tennis for a relief fund aimed at helping 800 players deal with the financial effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
The WTA and ATP tours, the International Tennis Federation and the groups that run the four Grand Slam tournaments announced Tuesday that they have formed the “Player Relief Programme.”
The Associated Press reported details of the plan Monday.
The seven groups said the money will be divided evenly among women and men, and will go to singles and doubles players. They also said the WTA and ATP will oversee the distribution of the money, based on eligibility requirements that “will take into account a player’s ranking as well as previous prize money earnings, according to criteria agreed by all stakeholders.”
Those criteria were not announced.
A total of $6 million distributed to 800 players works out to an average of $7,500 per recipient.
“Tennis has united in a time of crisis,” tweeted Billie Jean King, a 12-time Grand Slam singles champion who led the push to form a professional tour for women in the 1970s.
Tuesday’s statement referred to
“opportunities for additional contributions to follow,” adding that “funds raised through initiatives such as auctions, player donations, virtual tennis games and more ... are welcomed.”
Most professional tennis players rely on playing in tournaments for income, and all sanctioned events – more than 30 – have been scrapped since early March until at least mid-July because of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Wimbledon, for example, was canceled for the first time in 75 years, while the start of the French Open has been postponed from
May until September.
The organizers of the US Open, scheduled to begin in New York in late August, have said they are exploring various options and expect to make a determination sometime in June as to whether that tournament will be held at all.
Meanwhile, the tennis club where Novak Djokovic broke confinement rules in Spain said Tuesday it mistakenly allowed the top-ranked Serb to practice and apologized for the error.
Djokovic published a video of him training on Monday in apparent violation of Spain’s current rules amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The video posted on Instagram showed Djokovic exchanging shots with another man at the club in the coastal city of Marbella, where the Serb has been staying for the past several weeks.
Djokovic filmed the video while hitting shots and wrote he was “so happy to play on clay .. well, just for a bit with my phone in the hands.”
Spain has eased some of the lockdown measures that had been in place since mid-March, allowing professional athletes to return to practice, but most training centers and sports facilities must remain closed until next week.
“We are sorry that our interpretation of the regulation could have been erroneous, and this could have inconvenienced Mr Djokovic or any other citizen acting in good faith,” the Puente Romano Marbella Tennis Club said in a statement.
The statement, which was relayed by Djokovic’s management team, said the club received a request from the player to practice and gave him the go-ahead with the
“understanding that from May 4 all professional sports players were authorized to train.” The club said it therefore believed he was “permitted to train in our facilities.”
It said it later received a “clarification” from the Spanish tennis federation and “both parties have agreed that training should resume” only next week.
Rafael Nadal said he also went to train on a court this week, but he did it on private property because the rules weren’t fully clear to him.
Soccer players were among the exceptions who could start training inside sports facilities beginning this week.
Spain has been one of the countries most affected by the pandemic but it started loosening some of its restrictions on movement as the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 started to go down recently. The nation went into a lockdown on March 14.
Djokovic recently said he was against taking a vaccine for the coronavirus if it became mandatory to travel once the pandemic subsides, though he later said he was open to changing his mind.