‘She doesn’t understand the seriousness of the whole thing,’ Marta Kostyuk hits back at Paula Badosa for condemning Wimbledon’s ban on Russian athletes
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Marta Kostyuk and Paula Badosa
Ukrainian tennis player Marta Kostyuk has been very vocal over the last few months about the Russia-Ukraine war. She was adamant about her stand against Russian players and time and again spoke about the atrocities her countrymen faced. Unlike many players, she welcomed Wimbledon’s decision of banning Russian athletes.
After her first-round victory at the Madrid Open, she spoke about her relationship with World No.2 Paula Badosa. Kostyuk revealed that she doesn’t have a very good relationship with Badosa and narrated an incident to give context. She said that the two players met for the first time in Indian Wells when Badosa asked Kostyuk’s whereabouts amidst the war. The Ukrainian then asked her to play doubles with her which Badosa denied citing she doesn’t play doubles. But in the very next tournament, she played doubles with Aryna Sabalenka which surprised Kostyk.
“In early March, when we arrived in Indian Wells, it was the first time Paula and I met. She approached me and asked me, how I was and if everything was fine with my family. And that was it. In Indian Wells or in Dubai, I asked her if she would like to play doubles with me because I thought we could do well,” Kostyuk said.
“She said, let’s try to play in Madrid, let’s try somewhere else, but actually I don’t play doubles at all. Then I saw that she was playing doubles with Aryna Sabalenka in Miami and Stuttgart. It really surprised me. I realized I would no longer ask her about playing doubles together.”
Marta Kostyuk calls the tennis world ‘cruel’
Badosa recently spoke against Wimbledon’s ruling of banning Russian athletes. Kostyuk was quick to react on the matter and called Badosa’s quotes ‘strange’. She said that people don’t understand the seriousness of the situation and revealed how much the Ukrainians had to suffer. She also called the tennis world cruel for not speaking up and having double standards.
“Paula Badosa’s position was strange to me, but she is not the only one who feels this way. Many players are not in this triangle that we are in. They are very scared to think that there is some kind of criminal liability in Russia for “spreading the fake news about the war,” as it is called there,” she said.
“It frightens them and they refer to this, they say, there are such laws, they also have families, and so on. But they do not understand the seriousness of the whole thing, because they are not even in the same situation as Poles or Czechs who welcomed millions of people who fled the war. That’s why they have such an opinion. It surprised me and such surprises keep coming, I don’t understand, why. But this is not the first time I’ve been surprised in the past two months. That’s how cruel the tennis world as it is.”
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Lakshya Chopra
(2595 Articles Published)