Wimbledon stripped of tour ranking points
Decision reduces grand slam to status of exhibition event Number of other top English tournaments also penalised
Wimbledon has been stripped of its ranking points by the men’s and women’s tours as the tennis world dramatically escalated its response to the ban on Russian and Belarusian players.
On a humiliating day for British tennis, the Association of Tennis Professionals carried through with its threat to take action over the ban at around 7pm last night, with the Women’s Tennis Association following 45 minutes later.
The decision has wide-ranging ramifications for further tournaments in this country, with the WTA also removing ranking points from tournaments at Eastbourne, Birmingham and Nottingham.
The upshot is that Wimbledon has effectively been reduced to an exhibition tournament.
The world’s top male players, led by Rafael Nadal, had demanded the drastic course of action following a locker-room backlash to the ban.
And today, Wimbledon is facing up to one of the biggest crises in its history. There seems little prospect of the All England Club backing down over its decision – but it could potentially escalate the row even further, if it managed to corral the other three major tournaments into setting up a new grand-slam rankings system of their own.
The ban on Russian and Belarusian players prohibits men’s world No2 Daniil Medvedev from playing at SW19. It had been thought Wimbledon chiefs were keen to avoid the nightmare scenario of the Duchess of Cambridge presenting the trophy to a Russian in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Last night, Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries called for the tours to reconsider. “We deeply regret today’s decision,” she added, “and urge the ATP, WTA and ITF to consider its stance on ranking points at the Championships. It does not send the right message to either Putin or the people of Ukraine.”
Wimbledon organisers said they had “deep disappointment” at the removal of ranking points, but insisted they would stand firm. “We are considering our options,” they added. “We are also in discussion with our grand slam colleagues.”
The confrontational response of the two tours has shocked many. On Tuesday, WTA chief executive Steve Simon unexpectedly told a remote
The great pillars of the English sporting summer are all rooted, at some level, in notions of rank. Even as social occasions, they trigger paroxysms of status anxiety, with the scramble to secure debentures on Centre Court, admission to the parade ring at Royal Ascot or the Stewards’ Enclosure at Henley often as fierce as the contests that people are paying for the privilege of watching. So, let us not succumb to the delusion that Wimbledon’s loss of its ranking points this year is purely a statistical quirk. On the contrary, it represents a scalding rebuke that challenges the tournament’s very perception of itself.
In one fell swoop, the tours have just reduced tennis’s oldest and grandest major to the world’s most lavish exhibition event. It is a painful cross to bear for what, in the All England Club’s mind, was the pursuit of a righteous cause. By barring all Russian and Belarusian players from this summer’s instalment, officials calculated that they were not merely abiding by government policy, but showing solidarity with Ukrainians whose country was being bombed to oblivion by their enemy to the east.
This, at least, was a view shared by Alex Dolgopolov, Ukraine’s former world No13, who observed yesterday: “Tennis is more worried about Russians not being able to play or to promote their propaganda than it is about Ukrainians dying or being raped. Only Wimbledon and the LTA have shown they care about the real problem.” Except the ATP Tour has concluded differently, regarding Wimbledon’s Russia ban as an unacceptable affront to their core principle of treating players as independent contractors, not as national representatives.
The consequence is that the most celebrated fortnight in the calendar will, in terms of rankings, count for nothing. In tennis’s ugliest rows, one immutable law is that the will of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal shall always prevail. And amid potentially the bloodiest ground conflict in Europe since the Second
World War, these two titans have stayed implacably opposed to the idea of exiling their peers by nationality alone. It is their voices on the ATP’S four-strong player council that have held sway, with Nadal even declaring it his “job” to defend those frozen out by Wimbledon.
But the impact on a tournament they have won 10 times between them is grievous. A spectacle that could vault a surprise contender from the outer darkness into the world’s top 20 will now be eclipsed in the ranking stakes by a tiny grasscourt event in Santa Ponsa, where early rounds are watched by one man and a Majorca shepherd dog.
True, those who do appear will still be paid handsomely. The singles champions are expected to receive £1.7million apiece, while the British wildcards should receive a minimum £48,000 just for turning up. But be in no doubt, detaching Wimbledon from the rankings computer is a move that dramatically redraws the tennis landscape. For an illustration, look at what happens when you turn last year’s championships into a zero-points affair. Matteo Berrettini, the men’s runner-up, drops out of the top 10. The two losing semi-finalists, Hubert
Hurkacz and Denis Shapovalov, tumble down the order. Even the champion, Novak Djokovic, is badly knocked, with the loss of 2,000 points leaving him usurped by, yes, you guessed it, Daniil Medvedev.
It is the supreme irony of how this grisly episode has played out that Medvedev, the one man whom Wimbledon’s stance was most designed to wound, stands to be the clearest winner. Having carefully mapped out a schedule with no tour stops on English soil, the Russian, who has few points to defend on grass, could conceivably win in ’s-hertogenbosch, Santa Ponsa and Halle to close his deficit to Djokovic.
Come the end of Wimbledon, traditionally his weakest slam and the tournament that sought to banish him on the grounds of his national allegiance, he could be restored as the world No 1.
While a player ban might once have seemed morally justifiable, it has worked out as a self-inflicted injury for Wimbledon’s place in the sporting world. Organisers genuinely believed that they were acting in good faith – that by denying Vladimir Putin any opportunity to use a Medvedev triumph for cynical PR purposes, they were acting according to the Government’s strategy of alienating the Kremlin on every front. But they have discovered to their cost that this is a minority perspective in tennis. Their glorious showpiece, the one tournament that players talk of as breathlessly as Catholic pilgrims might a journey to Lourdes, has been left looking much the poorer. For all that rankings operate with a cold numerical logic, the damage to Wimbledon is not of the kind to which you can easily attach a figure. Instead, it lies in the knowledge that, if only for one year, it cannot credibly call itself the loftiest stage in tennis. Stepping through the All England Club’s gates is a ritual supposed to leave even the most decorated players weak at the knees. Djokovic memorably heralded Centre Court “the cathedral of our sport”. Well, if the defending champion will permit an extension of his metaphor, the roof of that cathedral has just fallen in.
ATP regards the ban an unacceptable affront to treating their players as independent contractors