World No 1’s stock has taken a pounding as ill-fated Adria Tour brutally acquaints tennis people with pandemic realities
After all the hugging, football games, invasions of personal space, dancing in stuffy Belgrade clubs, kids’ days, basketball games and more, the enduring images of the fateful Adria Tour should be the final ones. Following the cancellation of the championship match, the deflated players were ushered into a parking lot at the dead of night as they queued to see whether they too had been infected after Grigor Dimitrov’s positive coronavirus test.
Some of the details were striking. After two weeks of bros prancing around big crowds in the middle of a pandemic, everyone was suddenly wearing a mask for the first time. The photos also underlined how young the players involved were. Borna Coric, who also contracted the virus, Alexander Zverev, Donna Vekic and Andrey Rublev are grown enough to be responsible for their own decisions, but there needed to be better guidance from the elders around them. Most importantly, there was one absence. Arguably the best tennis player of all time had invited them all to his event and exposed them to unsafe conditions, but as they nervously waited he was nowhere to be seen.
Related: Novak Djokovic has learned he cannot hide from coronavirus in his own bubble | Kevin Mitchell
Continue reading...