How do you welcome back a reigning champion to a tennis grand slam? In Australia, if last night’s matches are any indication, it depends on your gender.
If you’re a man and your name is Novak Djokovic then you’ll have thousands of eyeballs on you as you saunter from change room to centre court. You’ll get a full stadium, the roar of applause, the flash of cameras and your match will be gifted a 7pm prime-time slot televised to millions around Australia. After you’ve won, you’ll be ushered away to a press conference where you’ll reflect on how you and your opponent played.
A full house for the Djoker. Credit: AP
If you’re a woman and your name is Aryna Sabalenka then you’ll walk into a virtually empty stadium on the cusp of midnight. There’ll be some modest ripples of applause but most of the crowd will have left after the men’s match. Televisions at home will have been switched off – Monday is a workday after all – and you’ll hit your first ball at 11.41pm.
Sabalenka’s opening match should have been momentous: never again will she be a defending first-time champion in Australia. Yet it started much as it ended, with a whimper. “Thank you so much for staying that late and supporting us,” she said, hopefully embarrassing AO organisers who only days earlier had boasted of change.
Introducing an extra day into the season’s opening grand slam, tournament director Craig Tiley said he had “listened to feedback from the players and fans and [was] excited to deliver a solution to minimise late finishes while continuing to provide a fair and equitable schedule on stadium courts.”
Aryna Sabalenka walks onto court late last night.Credit: Getty
The ATP and WTA had also earlier announced a new scheduling rule that there were to be no matches after 11pm. But a grand slam is an exception and the organisers, who could easily have scheduled the women’s match on a separate day, chose to have it follow an admittedly spellbinding and longer-than-anticipated four-set match between Djokovic and 18-year-old Croatian Dino Prizmic.
Commentators and fans have expressed their concern. Tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg posted on X: “Amid the wild ride of Djokovic-Prizmic, sparing a thought for defending #AusOpen champion Aryna Sabalenka, who is going to walk out to an almost empty Rod Laver Arena some time around midnight. The best-of-three [women’s] match should always go first in a night session.”
British tennis commentator Catherine Whitaker from The Tennis Podcast went further: “Imagine a world where women play the best of five and men play the best of three. Women would never be scheduled first, ever, because it wouldn’t be seen as acceptable to put a men’s best-of-three sets to start after a women’s best-of-five sets. It’s a slanted playing field as far as I’m concerned.”
Whitaker is spot on, and her words speak to a larger problem of tennis refusing to let women play five sets. If the AO organisers are concerned about the “fair and equitable treatment” of players then we need to start seeing gender parity in sets played.
Yes, we could schedule women’s three-set matches earlier. This is precisely what we witnessed through bleary eyes in 2023 when Andy Murray and Thanasi Kokkinakis duelled in an early dawn title fight. And we may well see it again this Wednesday when women commence the night draw on Rod Laver Arena at 7pm.
But variation of the schedule does little to fix the problem of players battling it out beyond midnight, women or men. It also does nothing to alter a fundamentally sexist hangover from the early twentieth century that sees women as delicate creatures, incapable of playing more than three sets without dissolving into a puddle of tears and unseemly sweat.
From 1891-1901 women played to the best of five sets in the US Nationals, later known as the US Open. Far from wilting, The New York Times reported that the battle between Mabel E Cahill and Ellen Roosevelt in 1891 was “splendidly fought from start to finish”. Arguments around women’s physical fragility saw it change to three sets in 1901, where it stayed until Billie Jean King argued for five sets in 1976 and the majority of women on the circuit voted in favour of it.
No tournament, however, took it up until the WTA in 1984 allowed for five sets in the WTA finals. Women played as superbly as always, yet without any plausible reason, it reverted to three sets in 1998 where it remains today: anachronistic, sexist and symbolic of women’s undervalued status in sport more generally.
The solution is simple. Have one match per evening, as they do in the French Open. But to prevent the majority of those slots going to men (Roland Garros 2023 had nine out of the 10 night matches played by men) alternate between genders. And until women are allowed to play five sets, change the scheduling to ensure that all night sessions begin with a three-set match, ideally before 7pm.
I doubt that any Australian felt proud of our treatment of Aryna Sabalenka last night. The AO organisers need to heed the lessons from the Matildas: women’s sport can shatter TV records and sell out stadiums, if it’s played when the majority of spectators are awake.
Alecia Simmonds is an Associate Professor in law at UTS and a tennis tragic. She is the author of Courting: An Intimate History of Love and Law.
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Why the Australian Open tennis schedule is sexist
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15.01.2024
How do you welcome back a reigning champion to a tennis grand slam? In Australia, if last night’s matches are any indication, it depends on your gender.
If you’re a man and your name is Novak Djokovic then you’ll have thousands of eyeballs on you as you saunter from change room to centre court. You’ll get a full stadium, the roar of applause, the flash of cameras and your match will be gifted a 7pm prime-time slot televised to millions around Australia. After you’ve won, you’ll be ushered away to a press conference where you’ll reflect on how you and your opponent played.
A full house for the Djoker. Credit: AP
If you’re a woman and your name is Aryna Sabalenka then you’ll walk into a virtually empty stadium on the cusp of midnight. There’ll be some modest ripples of applause but most of the crowd will have left after the men’s match. Televisions at home will have been switched off – Monday is a workday after all – and you’ll hit your first ball at 11.41pm.
Sabalenka’s opening match should have been momentous: never again will she be a defending first-time champion in Australia. Yet it started much as it ended, with a whimper. “Thank you so much for staying that late and supporting us,” she said, hopefully embarrassing AO organisers who only days earlier had boasted of change.
Introducing an extra day into the season’s opening grand slam,........
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