Saudi Arabia will host the WTA Finals as a part of a three-year deal introduced Thursday by the ladies’s skilled tennis tour that may enhance the prize cash for this November’s season-ending championship to a file $15.25 million, a 70% enhance from 2023.
The occasion for the highest eight singles gamers and high eight doubles groups can be held in Riyadh from 2024-26, a part of a current wave of funding by the dominion in tennis and varied sports activities, regardless of questions on LGBTQ+ and ladies’s rights there raised by Corridor of Famers Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova and others.
“We’re going into this eyes large open that the funding in sport by Saudi actually provokes sturdy views from folks,” WTA Tour Chairman and CEO Steve Simon informed The Related Press. “We’ve met with Chris and Martina and listened to their issues and we’ve shared their issues by our stakeholders as properly, with out prejudice. We’ve additionally shared the issues round girls’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights throughout the Kingdom of Saudi. Our focus is on how we develop girls’s tennis for the good thing about all people concerned within the recreation. The truth of it’s … we’re really a world tour, a world enterprise. We’ve got gamers from over 90 nations now. We’ve got over 90 occasions. … We take part in lots of nations which have completely different cultures and values methods throughout the board.”
As for any issues about Saudi Arabia that present gamers may need, Simon mentioned: “We don’t plan to do any persuading. The gamers must make their very own selections, and we do consider that everybody who qualifies goes to wish to play.”
Places in Europe, North America and Asia additionally have been thought-about as potential new websites for the WTA Finals, which have moved round to 5 cities over the previous 5 editions after a deal to place the match in Shenzhen, China, by 2030 was disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic and issues over the protection of retired Grand Slam doubles champion Peng Shuai, who accused a Chinese language authorities official of rape.
The cities that hosted in 2022 (Fort Price, Texas) and 2023 (Cancun, Mexico) weren’t revealed till September annually, and final November’s occasion was strongly criticized by gamers. 4-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek beat Jessica Pegula in final 12 months’s title match; U.S. Open champ Coco Gauff and Australian Open winner Aryna Sabalenka have been among the many different members.
Simon mentioned Riyadh was chosen by the WTA in late December, however the particulars of the settlement have been simply accomplished.
“This partnership will construct on our publicity to a market and a area whose affect on the sports activities trade is actually rising quickly,” Simon mentioned. “We actually count on that you just’ll see extra occasions coming there sooner or later. So on the finish, we consider that the WTA needs to be part of this improvement, versus being on the surface.”
Saudi Arabia’s Non-public Funding Fund (PIF) fashioned the LIV Golf tour and put cash into soccer, for instance, and the dominion’s function in tennis has been rising. The ATP Tour moved its Subsequent Gen Finals for main 21-and-under gamers to Jedda in November; the PIF is the title sponsor for the boys’s rankings; 22-time Grand Slam champion Rafael Nadal not too long ago grew to become an envoy for the Saudi Tennis Federation; he’ll be part of 24-time main champ Novak Djokovic and rising stars Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner at an exhibition occasion in Riyadh in October. There have been discussions about putting a top-tier Masters 1000 match in Saudi Arabia, too, a part of a potential bigger restructuring involving the WTA, ATP and the nation.
Rights teams say girls proceed to face discrimination in most elements of household life and homosexuality is a significant taboo, as it’s in a lot of the remainder of the Center East.
In recent times, Saudi Arabia has enacted wide-ranging social reforms, together with granting girls the appropriate to drive and largely dismantling male guardianship legal guidelines that had allowed husbands and male kin to manage many elements of girls’s lives. Women and men are nonetheless required to decorate modestly, however the guidelines have been loosened and the once-feared spiritual police have been sidelined. Nonetheless, same-sex relations are punishable by demise or flogging, although prosecutions are uncommon.
In an opinion piece printed in The Washington Submit in January, Evert and Navratilova urged the WTA to remain out of Saudi Arabia as a result of, they wrote, staging the Finals there “would symbolize not progress, however important regression” and requested whether or not “staging a Saudi crown-jewel match would contain gamers in an act of sportswashing merely for the sake of a money inflow.”
In response, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the USA, Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, mentioned the 2 former athletes relied on “outdated stereotypes and western-centric views of our tradition” and “turned their again on the exact same girls they’ve impressed and it’s past disappointing.”
The ambassador joined the top of the Saudi Tennis Federation and different girls in a video convention with present WTA athletes to “converse to the modifications which can be taking place and to what nonetheless must be accomplished throughout the area,” Simon mentioned.
The WTA mentioned the Finals prize cash will assist work to fulfill the tour’s pledge, made final 12 months, to extend pay and put it consistent with what males earn in tennis. The $15.25 million on provide from Nov. 2-9, 2024 — an quantity set to extend in 2025 and 2026 — is up from final 12 months’s $9 million and eclipses the event-high $14 million at Shenzhen in 2019.
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Howard Fendrich has been the AP’s tennis author since 2002. Discover his tales right here: https://apnews.com/writer/howard-fendrich.
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AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis
