As Oscar Wilde’s axiom goes: “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
This does not apply to stewardship in sport, especially in tennis and especially in tennis in 2024, which went through a series of high-profile calamities on and off the court.
On the court, umpires made mistakes, electronic line calling malfunctioned, video replays were less helpful than required and supervisors did very little about any of it. In less than 24 hours in October, three tennis players subjected three umpires to three tirades of different flavors in Shanghai, with American Frances Tiafoe’s f***-laden rant about a time violation later costing him $120,000 in fines (almost £95,000).
Off the court, two of the world’s highest-profile players, Jannik Sinner and Iga Swiatek, recorded positive doping tests. There cases were dealt with according to International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) protocol from start to finish, but the most prominent reaction in the tennis world was not relief at due process, but an outpouring of suspicion and perceived unfairness.
Two principles unite these situations. One: they are rare. The vast majority of tennis matches pass without even minor incident and players do not routinely fail doping tests.
Two: they are best understood as part of a sport whose systems of adjudicating matches and integrity are now at a crossroads.
So how did this all happen? And where does tennis go next?
James Hansen: A few high-profile mistakes in tennis this year featured umpires making errors while TV replays they couldn’t use showed everybody that they were wrong. In one instance at the U.S. Open, using the video review system designed to fix this problem still led to the wrong decision being made. What does this do for fans and for tennis?
Charlie Eccleshare: Watching slo-mo reruns of an obvious mistake is far from ideal for fans. There is little more frustrating than a match hinging on an incorrect call that could easily be corrected. Thankfully, matches rarely do turn on this kind of incident; if a player is match point down, as in Felix Auger-Aliassime’s incident with Jack Draper in Cincinnati, any stolen chance of a comeback is still a long way away. Given the drama, some fans advocate — perhaps provocatively — for less technology, returning to the pre-Hawk-Eye days that led to legendary outbursts from players like John McEnroe.
Overall, situations like this one harm tennis’ credibility — and it was damaging for both players. Auger-Aliassime was simmering with injustice; Draper, who came under fire for not conceding the point, told a group of reporters at the U.S. Open that he had thought about the incident for “four days non-stop.” That a player at the peak of his sport would be asked to self-adjudicate, rather than being able to rely on a failsafe officiating system, says a lot about the wider context of the incident.
Matthew Futterman: Most fans I talk to think the current system is like driving a stagecoach rather than an automobile. Everybody I know has accepted that computers are better at doing a lot of tasks than we are. I say that fully aware that a computer at some point is probably going to write about tennis better than I do; if you ever get a chance to hang around airline pilots, ask them how much time they spend flying the plane.
The handful I have spoken to basically say the computer is mostly better at it than they are, and we are all safer in the air because of it. It’s part of their life. It’s part of our lives. It should be an accepted part of the life of top-flight professional tennis. There’s too much money at stake, and too many eyes on the sport, for the people who most need the best available information on whether a ball has hit a line or not to be the only ones who don’t have it. It makes tennis look like a Mickey Mouse operation.
Hansen: Wimbledon this year decided to bring in ELC, so the French Open will be the only Grand Slam tournament without it in 2025. But that doesn’t solve the issue of umpires and players being the only people without replays. Only the U.S. Open has used them to date, and in Beatriz Haddad Maia’s match with Anna Kalinskaya, umpire Miriam Bley reached the wrong decision on a double-bounce call because the ‘wrong’ question was asked about the decision and she didn’t receive all the angles available. TV cameras did, so she was criticized for a decision she couldn’t fully make.
Tennis is clearly still learning how to integrate more technology into decision-making, so we’re likely to see incidents like these in 2025.
On the other side of technology vs. the human touch, the new automatic shot clock over which umpires no longer have control has not gone down well. Players don’t like it, ball kids have to pick up sweaty towels again after Covid-19 did away with them, and the clock doesn’t seem to do much about shortening matches other than aggravating players. In Shanghai, Tiafoe tried to game the clock by throwing the ball in the air when it counted down to zero, even though he clearly had no intention to serve. The umpire correctly applied the rules and got a volley of abuse after the match as a result.
Eccleshare: When a player as magnanimous as Carlos Alcaraz is so irritated by something, it’s probably worth taking stock. It’s hard to remember seeing him as annoyed as he was when asked about the new shot clock rule after losing to Jack Draper at the Cinch Championships in June.
“I think, for the player, it’s something bad,” he said. “It’s crazy… Today I felt like I was in a rush all the time.”
I can see the logic in taking away the subjectivity of an umpire starting the clock, but as tennis matches get longer and more physical it seems crazy (to use Alcaraz’s word) to shorten breaks between points, even marathon ones, for the sake of a few seconds. If tennis is serious about reducing match times, far more drastic measures are needed.
Futterman: Don’t end it, mend it. I want most humans off the court but not the chair umpires. They need to be empowered to have some discretion over whether a player is abusing the time allotment.
At 5-5 in a third set tiebreak, after a lungbuster of a point, Frances Tiafoe should not have to race back to start the next point. The umpire should not have to penalize him for taking a few extra breaths — even if he didn’t help himself by having zero intention to serve. Golf doesn’t have a shot clock, but there are marshals all over the course with stopwatches. We trust them with their discretion. I trust the chair umpires to issue a warning or two and decide as objectively as they can when stalling is happening. Jimmy Pinoargote, who was umpiring Tiafoe’s match, did that and got it right, even if the situation he was in felt unreasonable.
Hansen: What changes could tennis make to better support players and umpires in difficult scenarios, along with VR? Relatedly: supervisors, what are they for and should that change?
Eccleshare: There needs to be as much dialogue as possible between players and umpires to help them understand the pressure they are under. This is true of umpires and former players who now work in the media, who need to ensure their understanding of the rules and the roles of the people enforcing them are always properly understood.
Supervisors are there to ascertain whether or not the umpire has applied the rules of tennis correctly, rather than to act on judgment disputes. They therefore tend to fall on the side of the umpires, and are therefore viewed by most fans and players as doing little more than propping up their mates even though they are doing their job correctly.
When obvious mistakes do happen, it sometimes helps to bring in a third party who has access to more information. By the same token players should be able to admit when they’ve been wrong and overstepped the mark while not being too vilified for (within reason) letting their emotions get the better of them in what is such a highly-charged sport with so much at stake.
Futterman: I don’t think it should be on the player to request the engagement of the video assistant. In football, match officials have a wire in their ears. If they miss something big, someone should be able to tell them, quickly. Tennis should have something like that, too. Questions of consistency of application across tournaments will come up — it can feel unfair to have a buffet of support at Grand Slams but nothing at a 250-level event — but this is also the way of the world in football and it’s generally accepted, if not liked.
As for the supervisors and referees, please do your damn homework. Don’t walk out onto a court to supervise a tennis moment if you haven’t watched a video of what actually happened, and if you need to overrule the chair umpire, do it.
Hansen: How much are umpires put in bad scenarios by bad systems, and players by bad calls?
Eccleshare: I have a lot of sympathy for umpires who have to tread a line between seeming officious and lacking discretion. That was part of the pressure on Pinoargote during the Tiafoe incident. And by the same token, I have sympathy for the players, who, as in the case of Draper and Auger-Aliassime, are either wronged by an incorrect call or asked to self-officiate because the umpire doesn’t have a good enough view and the technology is for whatever reason unavailable.
Players have more than enough to worry and stress about in a match; the last thing they need is to self-officiate. It happened to Taylor Fritz against Brandon Nakashima in Cincinnati, when ELC malfunctioned and Greg Allensworth, the chair umpire who also oversaw the Auger-Aliassime/Draper incident, said Fritz had to be the one to challenge because Allensworth couldn’t overrule the call. Fritz rightly expressed how ridiculous that was, but Allensworth was correctly applying protocol.
Futterman: I think pretty much everything is a result of a bad system. The shot clock rule forced Tiafoe to rush to the line and do a terrible fake serve, but it also forced Pinoargote’s hand in terms of offering any discretion.
At the Olympics, the umpire in Coco Gauff’s match against Donna Vekic, Jaume Campistol, had to go into Gauff’s head and decide whether a mistaken out call hindered her swing, rather than looking at a replay. He had to guess what Gauff was thinking while remembering something that happens in a split second. Then Vekic had to deal with the crowd booing her part in a decision in which she actually played no part at all.
Stuff like this happens at so many tournaments, often out of sight and involving players who don’t garner coverage. You can go into any Challenger, 125, or ITF highlights package and see some egregious errors. College players handle it by ‘hooking’ each other back and forth, but when umpires are actually present, good systems can fix a lot of possible bad situations before they happen.
Hansen: Moving off the court, two of the best tennis players in the world faced doping cases in 2024. How did you respond to these when they came out?
Eccleshare: Well, as Oscar Wilde almost put it, to lose one leading player to a doping controversy may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Flippancy aside, the Sinner case was shocking to me, but when it happened again with Swiatek, that really was a stop-in-your-tracks moment. While the two are not linked and have been explained and adjudicated, tennis now finds itself in a very precarious position. One more high-profile case could lead to a credibility crisis, even if it would be only perceived, rather than real. Perception is everything.
Futterman: In every case like this, I look for the type of drug and the amount. Those are the first hints for whether anything else that follows, especially the player’s explanation, makes sense.
In Sinner’s case, when I saw it was clostebol, an anabolic steroid that East Germany’s state-sponsored doping program used in the 1970s, I thought something was off. You have to take a lot of clostebol to gain an advantage and doping experts I know had never encountered anyone using it to microdose. I followed the same process with the Swiatek positive. Again, I’d never heard of athletes microdosing trimetazidine and she tested positive for a tiny amount just once, which generally indicates inadvertent ingestion.
That said, Swiatek claiming she was at home attending to “personal matters” while provisionally suspended was harder to stomach. She wasn’t. She was fighting a doping charge. Athletes can’t see any benefit to revealing anything before a verdict and the ITIA protocol keeps their cases private if they successfully appeal as Swiatek did, so I get it, but it is still harder to trust someone once you know they have told a less-than-accurate version of events.
Hansen: Would revealing positive tests as soon as they occur make things better or worse?
Eccleshare: I’m torn, and ultimately think the players should have a voice on this. I can see that revealing the positive cases straight away would feel more transparent, since they will come out eventually. Why conceal them and risk making tennis look like it has something to hide?
There’s certainly a risk that by announcing positive tests straight away, a player is condemned as guilty before they’ve had a chance to prove their innocence, and that perception is likely to stick whatever the final verdict is. Some will dismiss this as pandering to the players, but a dialogue with them (as well as other stakeholders) about what they think would be best for them and the sport in general would be welcome.
Futterman: Better. Information wants to be free. Don’t set up a system because some people are ignorant and don’t believe in the bedrock concept of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law or some other judicial body.
Also, every doping expert knows all positive tests are not created equal. So don’t classify them the same. Set up another classification that signals that the positive test does not indicate an intentional rules violation that gave anyone an advantage. Again, the system is broken. Fix it.
Hansen: What responsibility do tennis integrity authorities have to make their processes transparent for fans and players and what responsibility to players have to ensure they know what is going on?
Eccleshare: Starting with the tennis integrity authorities, this is a big part of their role. It’s not an easy job because these are very complex issues, and unfortunately no case is exactly the same (as unsatisfying as that is to people who want easy answers). It’s worth remembering that the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) has only been in existence for three years.
With the players, it’s tricky because I wouldn’t want to discourage players from showing their true selves or emotions. It’s undoubtedly been hugely instructive to see some of the raw reactions to the Sinner and Swiatek cases from their fellow players, even though whether they have been fair, helpful or even accurate is another matter.
Part of the education young players receive from tennis’s governing bodies is about doping, and clearly it needs remain a priority.
Futterman: I’m a journalist. My livelihood depends on free speech. I’m not going to tell any player or anyone else they can’t say whatever they want – even if they know little about the subject matter. Like the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said: “The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
To that end, doping cases should be handled like legal cases. The charges and filings should be public, unless there is some serious reason for not disclosing them, and the bar for that ought to be very high. Brandeis: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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