“Shocked me personally, hurt me” Olga Savchuk criticizes the hypocrisy in the tennis world regarding the ban on Russian and Belarusian players
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Olga Savchuk
Olga Savchuk is a retired Ukrainian tennis player and now a coach and commentator. She has been coaching Karolina Pliskova, a former world number 1 since 2020. Since Savchuk is currently based in Britain, she along with her husband and child are out of physical danger, but mentally it’s still ghastly. In an interview with a Ukrainian Sports network, Savchuk talked about the hardships and struggles she has faced due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
About the state of her family in Ukraine, she said: “My family in Ukraine is already psychologically very tired. We call almost every day. It’s all very hard because you live in limbo all the time. Waiting for the war to end. The first thing I do is wake up and check the news. I can’t even imagine how my relatives who are directly in Ukraine feel.”
Olga Savchuk believes that many players agree with the ban but don’t admit it publicly.
Olga Savchuk also talked about Wimbledon‘s decision to ban the Russian and Belarusian athletes and the reaction of ATP and WTA on the same. She said: “The tours supported Russian and Belarusian players. At the same time, they did not say anything about Ukrainian players. That is, here the matter is already in the discrimination of another 1,000 players from other countries who play at Wimbledon. I don’t know what kind of discrimination they are talking about, if by their own decision they discriminated against a much larger part of the Tour than a few players [from Russia and Belarus].”
Savchuk also talked about the player’s sentiment regarding the ban saying: “People agree with the decision about a complete ban, but they don’t say it out loud. And when then they give interviews, then they say something else entirely. Most likely, this is due to the fact that it is difficult for them to declare this openly, being at the tournament, and then look these players in the face.”
She also said that she was extremely saddened by the tennis world’s apathy towards the whole situation. “It’s an amazing reaction that shows that people are actually very superficially interested in what’s going on. In the tennis world, I understand that 90% are not interested in this at all. It shocked me personally, hurt me, and I think about it every day,” she added.
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Prateek Sinha
(365 Articles Published)