A remarkable scene occurred Wednesday night in Guadalajara, Mexico at the championship event of the Women’s Tennis Association’s season.
After Barbora Krejcikova won the …
A remarkable scene occurred Wednesday night in Guadalajara, Mexico at the championship event of the Women’s Tennis Association’s season. After Barbora Krejcikova won the doubles title with her Czech partner Katerina Siniakova, she stood in front of Martina Navratilova at the trophy ceremony and spoke about the 32nd anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, a series of demonstrations that ultimately helped bring down the communist, non-democratic government in Czechoslovakia that Navratilova was forced to escape from in 1975. “Thanks to them and their sacrifice, today my generation can live in a beautiful country back home and live without any restrictions and also with freedom,” Krejcikova said as Navratilova wiped away tears in the background. It wasn’t lost on anyone who follows tennis that this incredible moment occurred at a tournament that, if not for COVID-19, would have been held in Shenzhen, a Chinese city of 17 million just across the border from Hong Kong. If there was any sports league that had reason to kowtow to Chinese censorship and look the other way on human rights, it was the WTA. Over two months in the fall of 2019, the WTA sanctioned eight tournaments in China totaling almost $30 million in prize money, an amount that would be difficult to equal in other parts of the world. When Ash Barty won the WTA Finals singles title, she took home $4.42 million — significantly more than the $2.6 million payday for winning the French Open earlier that year. For women’s tennis, the choice to park their tour in China between the U.S. Open and the Australian Open did not look like a luxury but rather a necessary element of doing business that made a lot of people a lot of money. But in the wake of former Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai’s disappearance after she alleged that a former government official sexually assaulted her, the WTA is embracing a fundamental truth that the rest of sports has tried desperately to avoid.
