A Chinese courtside interviewer appeared to censor Poland’s world number 45 Magda Linette as she tried to apologize for a Covid joke.
In the week of the WTA Tour’s much-anticipated return to Wuhan, Linette had managed to upset some locals with a poorly judged social media post.
Wuhan – which last hosted a tournament in 2019 – is still best known as the origin of the Covid pandemic, and Linette had posted a photo of her train from Beijing to Wuhan on X (formerly Twitter).
She then added a caption in Polish that read: “The virus database has been updated.”
On a turbulent day in the tennis world, Linette easily defeated Liudmila Samsonova in her first-round match in Wuhan on Tuesday, but faced some hostility from the crowd.
Linette’s tweet appeared to have irritated some fans attending her match, as scattered shouts came from the stands.
After completing a 6–2, 6–2 victory, Linette began her on-court interview by saying, “I know I offended some of you, so I…”
At this point the interviewer took the microphone back and said, “Okay, talk about your performance.”
Linette added: “Thank you so much for being so nice to me,” before leaving the court, but her interrupted apology was not passed on to the fans – at least, the fans who didn’t speak English.
The interviewer switched to Chinese and said, “She said ‘Thank you.’ That’s all ours today. The game is over.”
Confrontations in Shanghai
Meanwhile, in Shanghai, there were two separate confrontations between players and referees. The more dramatic of the two incidents involved Frances Tiafoe, the recent US Open semifinalist, who shouted a series of four-letter words at Jimmy Pinoargote after committing a time violation on the penultimate point of his long 5-7, 7- 5. , 7-6 loss to Roman Safiullin.
Because Tiafoe had already been warned earlier in the match that he would take too much time, he had to make do without a first serve at 5-5 in the deciding set tiebreak. After a long rally he eventually lost the point, after which Safiullin closed his victory with an ace.
Tiafoe objected to the call as soon as it was made, saying he had already started his service move by the time the shot clock expired. Pinoargote remained unmoved.
After shaking Safiullin’s hand, Tiafoe shouted, “F… you man. F— you. Seriously dude. You ruined my damn match. Three fucking hours and that’s what you’re going to do. Why? You ruined the match. Great work. F—!”
This year’s French Open finalist Alexander Zverev exploded after a ‘not up’ call in his narrow 7-6, 2-6, 7-6 win over Tallon Greekpoor, even though replays showed he cleared the ball had reached on the second bounce .
Zverev turned to chair umpire Mohamed Lahyani and said that “referees are ruining the tournament this year. Carlos Bernardes completely ruined Stan’s [Wawrinka] yesterday’s match [by mistakenly giving the first point of the crucial game to his opponent]. The guy who did Tiafoe’s match completely ruined Tiafoe’s match. And now this.
“Every Grand Slam final I play, I lose because of your mistake,” added Zverev, who was denied a key point in May’s French Open final when a Carlos Alcaraz second serve was wrongly ruled to be on the line had ended.
“I’ve played more than 80 games this year, with injuries, with illness, with everything. And I can’t be bothered to go to China in October just for you to ruin this. This is not possible. I have been playing for nine months now.”
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