How Wimbledon has got it all wrong on tennis and politics

By banning individual Russian and Belarusian players, it’s dug a trench that is too deep to climb out of

On April 20, Wimbledon became the first standalone tennis tournament to refuse entries to Russian and Belarusian players. Against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war, the All-England Club, set to conduct the 2022 edition of the tournament from June 27 to July 10, stated that the move was to stymie the Russian government under Vladimir Putin from deriving “any benefits from the involvement of Russian or Belarusian players with The Championships”.

The move was not the first of its kind. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis in eastern Europe in early March, multiple sports governing bodies, including football’s FIFA, had initiated steps to remove Russian teams from their competitions. Even the International Tennis Federation had announced that Russia will no longer be part of its flagship team competitions, the Davis Cup – of which Russia is the defending champion – and the Billie Jean King Cup.

But the decision from Wimbledon was unprecedented because of how international tennis is structured. It is the most individual of sports, in which players act as independent contractors, and whose worth is decided solely by the magic ranking number next to their names. The link between tennis and national identity has been tenuous at best.

Understandably, the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) and the WTA (Women’s Tennis Association), who run the men’s and women’s tours respectively, saw it as a violation of the agreement they have with tournaments in which a player’s entry is based on ranking and not nationality. In fact, the foundational principle of the WTA in 1973, when the legendary Billie Jean King led the movement, was “equal opportunity”. Wimbledon was seen as going against that.

Merits of the debate aside, not since the end of apartheid in South Africa and the Cold War has the discussion on sporting sanctions acting as deterrents been this heightened. In fact, since the mid-1990s, there has been a consistent decline in the number of such calls for boycotts and bans. There were murmurs when Beijing played host to the Olympics in 2008, Sochi to the 2014 Winter Olympics and Russia to the 2018 football World Cup. Concerns have been raised about Qatar 2022 (football). But they haven’t snowballed into giant controversies.

The reason could be two-fold. In a globalised world, built on the idea of free movement of people and shared economic interests, sanctions can often turn counter-productive, prompting nations to tread cautiously. A case in point is European nations’ enormous dependence on Russian gas that is proving a hindrance in imposing far-reaching sanctions in the ongoing crisis over Ukraine. Even the U.S. went only so far as a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. It captured little to no public attention.

The other reason is probably the chequered history of sanctions and boycotts that were indeed imposed, including sporting ones, in making a tangible contribution towards political change. The jury is still out on what the U.S. and its allies’ boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics (over the Afghanistan invasion) and the erstwhile Soviet Union’s of the 1984 Los Angeles Games achieved.