Amelie Mauresmo, the previous No. 1 participant who’s in her first yr as the primary feminine director of the French Open, mentioned on Wednesday that 9 of the ten evening periods at Roland Garros included males’s matches as a result of girls’s tennis presently has fewer. “enchantment.”
Talking on the conventional week two press convention summarizing the clay-court Grand Slam event, Mauresmo mentioned she tried on daily basis to discover a star energy feminine duo or a match worthy of being highlighted within the separate session that started at 8:45 p.m. The District Courtroom in Philippe Chatrier.
“I admit it was troublesome,” mentioned Mauresmo, 42, from France.
Iga Swiatek, presently ranked No. 1, mentioned after her quarter-final win in Paris on Wednesday that she discovered Mauresmo’s feedback “somewhat disappointing and shocking”.
“It is sort of a private opinion of everybody in the event that they like males’s tennis or girls’s tennis extra or in the event that they like them equally, however I feel girls’s tennis has plenty of benefits,” mentioned Swiatek, the 2020 French Open champion. Who gained 33 consecutive matches?. “And a few would possibly say it is unpredictable and women aren’t constant. However however, it may additionally be one thing actually engaging and would possibly entice extra individuals.”
Ladies’s Swiatek gained on Wednesday, eleventh seed Jessica Pegula, deeming Mauresmo’s stance “not one thing you wish to hear” and noting that one of the simplest ways to extend curiosity in any sport is to “get possibilities” to point out how good the product is.
“After all, it is at all times somewhat disappointing to listen to that is why she thinks, being a feminine…a slam champion,” mentioned Pegula, a New Yorker whose mother and father personal the NFL’s Buffalo Payments and Buffalo Sabers. “However hopefully we will change that.”
She has additionally supplied in protection of her sport, which presently lacks the power of 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams, Who has not competed since his harm at Wimbledon Virtually a yr in the past.
“For me, I really feel like lots of people like to look at girls’s tennis as a result of we don’t have a giant serve. We don’t excel. There should not plenty of tremendous quick factors and there are extra rallies,” Pegula mentioned. There may be extra drama.”
This yr’s French Open began on Might 22 and can finish on Sunday. The final of the evening’s 10 periods was Wednesday’s males’s quarter-final between Casper Ruud and Holger Ron, and the one girls’s match to obtain the prime-time therapy – a part of a take care of the streaming service – was France’s Alize Cornet’s victory over Jelena Ostapenko within the second spherical.
Requested concerning the decision-making course of, Mauresmo mentioned in French that having just one match per evening session makes it “tougher to get” a girls’s match. The evening periods on the US Open, for instance, often embrace one girls’s sport and one males’s sport.
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“Within the age we’re in now, I do not really feel — and as a lady, a former girls’s participant, I do not really feel unhealthy or unfair for saying that, now — you have got extra… attractiveness,” Mauresmo mentioned. “That is the final (motive) for males’s matches.”
She added, “My aim, once I was doing the schedule on daily basis, was to attempt to see, from the primary spherical, when the lottery got here out…” Which girls’s lottery match might I put there? ” Fairly frankly.”
Mauresmo topped the WTA rankings for the primary time in 2004 and returned to this place after successful the Australian Open and Wimbledon in 2006.
Her final main event was the 2009 US Open. After retiring as a participant, Mauresmo moved into teaching and labored with Andy Murray, Lucas Puel and Marion Bartoli, amongst others, and was France captain for the group competitors now referred to as the Billie Jean King Cup.
A Mauresmo session with reporters was held within the morning after he gained the French Open 13 occasions Rafael Nadal wins 6-2, 4-6, 6-2, 7-6 (4) within the quarter-finals in opposition to defending champion Novak Djokovic at a Tuesday night session. The match lasted 4 hours 12 minutes and ended simply after 1 am, leaving a number of the 15,000 or so spectators unable to make use of public transportation to get house.
“That is really a significant challenge that must be resolved, and it will likely be one among our priorities going ahead,” Mauresmo mentioned. “We’ve not deliberate something but, however clearly we have to set up ourselves otherwise with the Transport Ministry in Paris with bus programs and the subway system. If we proceed these evening periods on this course, individuals might want to depart the stadium late sufficient and ensure Than they’ve a technique to go house, as they need to.”
Nadal, by the media, and his supervisor Carlos Costa, straight with Mauresmo, defined that the proprietor of 21 Grand Slam titles prefers to not play at evening, due to the way in which low temperatures have an effect on his pictures. It dropped beneath 60 levels Fahrenheit (15 levels Celsius) in the course of the quarter-finals.
When requested by Mauresmo about it, he shrugged off the query and replied, “Rafa has proven us how robust he’s as a hero, other than all these issues.”
Mauresmo mentioned a full evaluation of the whole event shall be performed after its conclusion, together with consideration of modifications to the evening periods and different scheduling issues.
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