PARIS (AP) — Tennis Corridor of Famer and equal rights advocate Billie Jean King thinks the French Open ought to have scheduled extra girls’s matches for the Grand Slam event’s high-attention night time classes – each out of equity and since that’s the easiest way to deliver extra consideration to the gamers.
King additionally mentioned at a information convention Saturday at Roland Garros that she thinks new event director Amelie Mauresmo will change that for 2023.
Solely one of many 10 night time classes throughout this 12 months’s event featured girls.
When Mauresmo was requested about that on Wednesday, she mentioned it’s as a result of males’s tennis has extra “attraction” in the meanwhile and it was arduous for her to seek out star gamers or high-wattage matchups within the girls’s draw to highlight.
“It’s going to keep that manner if we don’t have extra matches, that’s for certain,” King mentioned.
“You’ve acquired to place them when it’s prime time, and you’ve got to determine it out, and also you need to give equal alternative to each genders. All the time. You at all times need to ensure you do the correct factor by every particular person,” she mentioned. “They need to have the identical quantity of girls’s matches as they do males’s.”
The 78-year-old American was elected to the Worldwide Tennis Corridor of Fame in 1987 for a enjoying profession that included time at No. 1 within the rankings and 39 Grand Slam titles, together with 12 in singles. She was inducted once more final 12 months together with the opposite members of the Authentic 9 who laid the groundwork for the ladies’s skilled tennis tour within the Nineteen Seventies.
“If we hold treating us like second-class residents, we are going to keep second-class residents. You need to make everybody really feel necessary. We should always have extra matches,” King mentioned, “however I feel Amelie will maintain that subsequent 12 months.”
On Friday, King obtained France’s highest civilian honor, the Legion of Honor, throughout a ceremony on the presidential Elysee Palace on the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron. She was acknowledged for her contributions to girls’s sports activities, gender equality and the rights of LGBTQ individuals.
Throughout a ceremony at Roland Garros between the ladies’s semifinals on Thursday, King was honored by the French Tennis Federation for her enjoying profession and her advocacy work. It’s the fiftieth anniversary of her 1972 championship on the French Open.
