Домой United States USA — Sport Ashe Stadium Again Turns Into an Arena of the Absurd

Ashe Stadium Again Turns Into an Arena of the Absurd

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The stadium has been home to thrilling tennis moments, but also to strange and unusual ones.
Since its opening in 1996, Arthur Ashe Stadium has been the site of some of the most thrilling tennis in the history of the game, matches that have gone into the small hours of the night, in front of raucous and often unruly crowds, by tennis standards. It has also been the site of some of the strangest, most controversial moments in the sport. On Sunday, in what has already been a strange tournament — the first Grand Slam of the Open era to be played without spectators — Ashe added another spectacle to the list, even though only a handful of people were there to see it: tournament officials defaulting the world No.1, Novak Djokovic, from his fourth-round match for hitting a ball into the throat of a line judge. Officials did not release the name of the judge, who was treated at the tennis center after crumpling to the ground upon being struck by the ball. Although the episode was unintentional, the rules required that Djokovic, who had just lost his serve to go down,5-6, in the first set to Pablo Carreño Busta, be eliminated from the tournament. Because he was defaulted, he lost all of the ranking points he earned from his first three matches in the tournament. He will also be fined the money he earned at the Open, which was $250,000, and is likely to receive an additional fine for the episode. “The referee and the supervisor do the right thing, but is not easy to do it,” Carreño Busta said. No one had a stranger experience of the event than Carreño Busta, who was on the other side of the net when it happened, and then waited to see if the judge was OK and whether he was going to win the match without having to hit another ball.

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