The association has precipitated pressure within the locker rooms and different widespread areas at tournaments. Gamers from Ukraine, like Yastremska and Lesia Tsurenko, have spoken about their discomfort with being round Russian and Belarusian gamers, a few of whom, they assume, assist President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“We all know how fashionable he’s of their nation,” Tsurenko stated of Putin earlier this 12 months.
Then, in April, Britain’s Parliament directed the All England Membership, which organizes Wimbledon, and the Garden Tennis Affiliation, which oversees a number of different tournaments in Britain, to ban gamers from Russia and Belarus from taking part within the grass-court occasions there in June and July. The membership and the affiliation adopted swimsuit, prompting the tennis excursions to withhold rankings factors from Wimbledon and threaten penalties in opposition to the opposite tournaments.
Russian gamers expressed frustration. The event went on with out them, together with Medvedev, now the world’s top-ranked males’s singles participant.
Then, in a twist of additional complexity, as Russia stepped up its siege of jap Ukraine, Elena Rybakina, who was born and raised in Russia, gained the Wimbledon ladies’s singles championship. Rybakina started representing Kazakhstan 4 years in the past after the previous Soviet republic supplied to finance her growth, highlighting the fruitlessness of barring gamers based mostly on their nationality. Like all of the gamers from Russia and Belarus whose households nonetheless dwell in these international locations, Rybakina was cautious to keep away from any dialogue of the battle.
Rublev, Kasatkina and different high Russians and Belarusians, together with Azarenka, all performed in tournaments in the USA final week.
Simply as within the spring, their matches have been largely with out incident and the gamers have largely restricted their post-match feedback to tennis and dodged questions concerning the victims of the invasion or their sentiments concerning the leaders of their international locations.
