By Alix Ramsay
First and foremost: huge congrats to Coco Gauff on winning the WTA Tour Finals.
From a brutal opening set and through to comeback in the second set and then a nailbiter of a third, Gauff beat finally beat Zheng Qiwen 3-6, 6-4, 7-6(2). She is the champion of the most prestigious event the WTA has on its calendar.
And yet.
That the event was held in Saudia Arabia was a huge issue. Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova both made their thoughts clear: it was a step backwards for women’s rights.
Most journalists also expressed the same view: the killing of the Saudi dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, allegedly (the term is used loosely here) by members of the Saudi government in 2018 could not be forgotten.
That women in Saudi still are still required to have a “male guardian” (whatever role that may be; and none of us outside Saudi really know what that is) and so have no real freedom (although – woo-hoo – they had been allowed to drive a car since 2018); that no one could express their real views on social media without the threat of imprisonment. That any opposition to the Saudi rule would end in the same imprisonment. That a woman uncovering her head could end up in prison – that is the level of female oppression in the Saudi state.
As for LGBTQIA rights and freedoms, let’s not go there.
And yet.
The WTA needed money and they took the Saudi dollars. Other sports have done this, too, but it was not in the same desperate way. Golf saw a chance to make a mint through the LIV Tour but the “establishment” pushed back. That row is ongoing.
The ATP quietly sidestepped the Saudi tennis takeover – their Tour Finals are sponsored by Nitto – but still allowed the Saudi Public Investment Fund, in other words the commercial wing of the Saudi ruling family, to sponsor their rankings. For now. Who knows what will happen on the future.
And yet.
If we ignore the moral arguments about holding the WTA’s season-ending, and most prestigious event in Saudi, there are other more obvious issues to discuss,
The King Saud University stadium was built to hold 5,000. Or according to Sky TV, who may or may not have been asked to downgrade that at the end of a less-than-populated event, 4,000 people. But for the final, it was a sell out as it was – almost – for the semi-finals. Prior to that, it was grim. Overall, they attracted around 21,000 people. For the showcase event for the WTA. Over the six days prior to the finals weekend, that computes to a half full stadium at best. But it was worse than that in the first few days.
As the WTA Finals began, with few in the seats, the Rolex Paris Masters in Paris was coming to the final and was being shown on the same TV channel: 15,000 packed into the Paris stadium. And there had been packed houses throughout the week, too. For a Masters 1000. Yes, a big tournament but not the season-ending jamboree. This was not a good comparison.
To compare the Saudi event to the ATP Tour Finals in Turin, the Italian stadium holds 12,000; when the ATP Finals were in London, the maximum capacity was 17,500. And in both arenas, they pretty much put every bum on every seat.
Last month, the Six Kings Slam – an exhibition jolly featuring Novak Djokovic, Rafa Nadal, Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, Daniil Medvedev and Holger Rune, had sell-out crowds of 8,000 in Riyadh.
For the WTA Finals, there were days when 400 or so turned up to watch. Of those ticket holders, most were men. True, Zheng Qinwen pulled in fans but they were ex-pat Chinese (and they made themselves heard). But local women? We didn’t see them until the end of the event. And only then in limited numbers.
Tennis governors, be they men’s or women’s, have shown themselves to be pathetic pushovers when faced with the Saudi millions. Cash to be had? We’ll take it.
Yet Gauff’s victory on Saturday may prove to be a double-edged sword for the Saudis. She is an intelligent, articulate speaker on behalf of the WTA.
As she explained at the start of the Finals: “I want to see it for myself, see if the change is happening. I really do feel like in order to ignite change, you have to start little by little. That’s how I’ve been taught growing up black in America, knowing our history.
“If I felt uncomfortable or felt like nothing’s happening, then maybe I probably wouldn’t come back.”
If their first WTA Finals champion didn’t come back next year then the Saudis would not be happy and the WTA would have nowhere to turn. And Chrissie and Martina would have been proved right all along.
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