At French Open, Ukrainian tennis stars seek Russian support

For decades, Paris in the month of June has meant a jewel for tennis lovers the world over: the French Open, held on the red-clay courts of Roland Garros on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. One of the sport’s four “majors,” it inevitably inspires headline writers to celebrate the sporting “drama” as top players “battle” for the crown.

Yet this week, a real war – Vladimir Putin’s brutal assault on Ukraine – is casting a shadow over the forehands and backhands, drop shots and lobs in Paris.

And a real, very human drama has been playing out among the top competitors on the women’s side of the game, stars from Russia, Putin-allied Belarus, and Ukraine.

The tension peaked one afternoon this week, in a hard-fought quarterfinal victory by Belarusian star Aryna Sabalenka over Ukrainian Elina Svitolina, the highest-profile match between the players since the invasion.

And it was about more than the tennis.

The two young women had to face a fundamental question – one for which their years of single-minded dedication to tennis cannot have prepared them or their fellow players: how to respond, as individuals, to a savage war neither of them started, neither of them can halt, but which, as citizens of the belligerent countries and worldwide celebrities, neither could simply ignore.

An awkward few seconds at the end of Tuesday’s quarterfinal made it clear that question still hangs in the air at Roland Garros.

Ukraine’s Ms. Svitolina, like all her countrywomen in Paris who faced Russian or Belarusian opponents, had announced beforehand that she would skip the traditional post-match handshake. She walked to her chair, collected her rackets, and left the court.

Ms. Sabalenka, however, stood at the net after winning, as if expecting a handshake, looking quizzically up to her coach and support team as the stadium booed the departing Ms. Svitolina.

For the Ukrainian players, the moral, political, and personal imperative to respond to the war has been clear. They are facing the week-to-week ordeal of playing world-class tournament tennis in the knowledge that their friends, family, and loved ones are being battered by the war.

They’ve used their post-match news conferences to highlight the suffering being inflicted on their country. They’ve sent their winnings home. And they’ve tried to persuade fellow players, especially from Russia and Belarus, that they, too, should speak out.

The situation for the Russian and Belarusian players is almost a mirror image: Their nations are not under attack. But facing up to the war has proved harder.

None has openly supported the war. Some have offered a general call for “peace.” But almost none of them has condemned the Russian invasion or Belarus’ supportive role in it, and instead they have tried to avoid talking about it at all.

There have been a few exceptions, most prominently Russia’s top-10 woman player Daria Kasatkina. She has denounced the war, and said on the eve of the French Open that Ukrainian players “have a lot of reasons not to shake hands with us.”

Both after defeating one Ukrainian, Lesia Tsurenko, and then after losing to Ms. Svitolina one round later, Ms. Kasatkina simply walked to her chair without a handshake. She offered a smile, a discreet wave, and a supportive thumbs-up to her opponents as she left the court.

But it is Ms. Sabalenka’s response that has been more typical of the Russians and Belarusians: an insistence the war has nothing to do with her, and that while she wants it to end, her focus is on tennis.

Some fraught encounters with the media in Paris, though, have suggested that the war may be raising difficult personal questions for her as well.

At a post-match news conference early in the tournament, a Ukrainian reporter called on her to renounce her past support for Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Ms. Sabalenka declined to answer. Then she stopped doing full-scale press conferences, saying she felt “not safe” and had to protect her own mental health.

After Tuesday’s match, however, she did attend a standard news conference, and she tried to explain how hard she was finding it to respond to the war. “I’m just a tennis player, a 25-year-old tennis player,” she said almost plaintively. “I don’t want to be involved in any politics. I just want to be a tennis player.”

Still, she did go a little further toward taking a stand, saying not only that she wanted an end to the war, but that “I don’t want my country to be involved in any conflict. I don’t support Lukashenko right now.”

The real question, however, remains whether it is possible for a Ukrainian, Russian, or Belarusian at Roland Garros, and next month at Wimbledon, to be “just a tennis player” in the current circumstances.

One leading Russian player, world No. 2 Daniil Medvedev, who has expressed public support for Ukrainian players, clearly has his doubts.

“In this moment,” he said soon after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, “you understand that tennis sometimes is not that important.”