US Open a Coming-Out Party for Russian and Belarusian Tennis Stars

“I feel, overall, people are tired of it now, tired of hearing about it,” she said of the war. “Things are slowly changing that way, and so it’s like I should just go with it. And this is horrible, because for us, we cannot just go with it. Nothing has changed for us. It’s just worse. More time, more destruction, more losses.”

Wimbledon’s controversial ban, the first of its kind at a major tennis tournament in the modern era, was made under considerable pressure from the British government, whose prime minister was then Boris Johnson.

The British leadership wanted to avoid Wimbledon being used as propaganda by Vladimir V. Putin and the Russian government.

Ukrainian players expressed deep appreciation for the ban and the support.

“All of us, we wrote to the Wimbledon organization and the tournament director as well, and I talked to him personally,” Savchuk said.

But the ban did not quite work as planned. The surprise women’s singles champion turned out to be Elena Rybakina, a Russian-born player who had agreed to represent Kazakhstan because of its financial support but long remained based in Moscow.

Shamil Tarpischev, the longtime president of the Russian Tennis Federation, made a celebratory statement after her victory.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/sports/tennis/us-open-russia-ukraine.html