Tennis walks into quarantine

While cancellations and postponements continue unchecked for one reason or another, due to pandemic or snow, in the most diverse sports, handball, futsal, cycling, basketball or soccer, professional tennis circuits have been sheltered in an atypical calendar and in strict requirements to advance towards his first Grand Slam of the year: the Australian Open, which will be held three weeks later than planned, from February 8 to 21. Tennis is already underway with three competitions in unison, two from the ATP, Delray Beach and Antalya, and one from the WTA, Abu Dhabi, which will crown the first three champions of the 2021 season this Wednesday 13. At the same time they are also competing the preliminary phases of Australia, which have been taken outside your country, to Doha and Dubai, so as not to interfere with the rigid sanitary protocol to which tennis players will be subjected. The rest are prepared in their usual places: Rafa Nadal, for example, exercises at his Academy with Roberto Bautista, one of the players who usually starts the course stronger.

A couple of days after these tournaments, between January 15 and 17, the Open participants will arrive at Melbourne and Adelaide to face a two week quarantine, locked in hotels, although with minimal permits to train. The conditions are mandatory under warning of harsh administrative and criminal sanctions. If you do not accept, you stay at home, which is what he seems to have done Roger Federer, according to information confirming that his discharge was for family reasons and not for his injury. In return, Melbourne to host two previous events, plus the ATP Cup, at the beginning of February, so that tennis players can acquire a competitive rhythm. A very demanding but imaginative solution. The alternative was to leave the calendar blank. Much worse.