By: Hannah Yang

Tennis champions are competing in Wimbledon, the oldest and the most prestigious tennis tournament, with prize money of $40,350,000.

According to Matthew Futterman of the NY Times, “Rafael Nadal can play top-level tennis with a zombie foot and a tear in an abdominal muscle, but only for so long. Iga Swiatek is beatable, at least on grass. With the Moscow-born Kazakhstan representing Elena Rybakina making the women’s singles final, barring Russian players does not necessarily make a competition free of Russian players.”

After about two years of canceled tournaments, longer than any major sport has ever stopped, tennis had struggled most to cooperate with Covid-19. A month later, Novak Djokovic, who played in the men’s single-player tournament, contracted a second coronavirus case. He didn’t think it was an issue, even though he was unvaccinated. Since the game was in Australia, a country to take COVID-19 vaccination rules seriously, officials deported him, saying that it might encourage more people not to vaccinate.

“Tennis, unlike other sports that surged ahead of the health and medical guidelines to keep their coffers filled, has had to reflect where society at large has been at every stage of the pandemic. Its major organizers canceled or postponed everything in the spring and early summer of 2020. However, Djokovic held an exhibition tournament that ended up being something of a superspreader event,” explained Matthew Futterman, writing for the NY Times.

Futtermann continued, “Unless the rules change, he may not play in another Grand Slam tournament until the French Open next May, something he said he was well aware of but would not shift his thinking about whether to take the vaccine.”