While the 2020 US Open remains hopeful that the tournament will take place and this year’s French Open continues to push back the dates, the 2021 Australian Open is pessimistically, or shall we say realistically, taking into account the possibility that the event in Melbourne could be cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The coronavirus outbreak put a stop to the tennis season in early March and even though the Australian Open is still almost nine months away, Tennis Australia chief Craig Tiley is aware of the fact that the Grand Slam event will not escape the impact of the pandemic, as fans from abroad will hardly be able to attend even if the tournament does go ahead.
“Worst-case scenario is no AO,” Tiley told the Australian Associated Press.
“Our best-case scenario at this point is having a tournament with players that we can get in here with quarantining techniques and Australian-only fans.”
Tennis tournaments have been suspended at least until July 13th. During the lockdown, we’ve had a couple of innovative online events — the Mutua Madrid Open Virtual Pro and the Stay at Home Slam. Moreover, top-tier tennis is slowly returning on a local level, as this month we’ll have the UTR Pro Match Series presented by Tennis Channel played without audience on a private court in the West Palm Beach, FL, area. (source: ESPN)
Absolutely absurd over-reaction by Tiley. Australia has had a very low volume of cases and deaths. No reason they can’t go back to life, instead of continuing the insane Covid lock-down insanity mentality gripping the world.
Dennis, I understand your point of view, but he was more referring to the lack of audience and difficulty in bringing all the players from around the world. Australia is remote for a lot of people and travel will probably continue to be restricted, plus, a lot of people will refrain from traveling, especially far away.
Oh so we in Australia should open things up so we can have more people die like other countries? What a callous attitude. Personally I am glad that our government is taking steps to prevent more people from dying, and if that means one Australian Open is cancelled, so be it. However, if it did go ahead with quarantine for players and local audience only, I would consider going.
CLT, as I understand, the virus will subside and it is already not as strong as it was two months ago. Nobody will come to Australia to spread the virus. Most countries have locked their borders, but the opening will not be simultaneous and travel will be very restricted, so it will be hard for players to come from all around the world. But I think that things will normalize by January to a great extent, although I also think that many tennis fans will opt out of traveling to remote destinations.
CLT -You are assuming the virus panic and lockdown extremism is a valid response and that the virus is actually as deadly as flawed models on which such lockdowns were based are valid. We now know they are not valid, that the “scientist” responsible for the models is a charlatan with a long history of being vastly wrong about everything for decades (it beggars belief he was till listened to by anyone in 2020; he predicted 150 million swine flu deaths a dozen years ago, there were about 275; he predicted 150,000 mad cow disease deaths in the UK nearly 20 years ago, there were 200; etc. Yet his model was the one that convinced the UK and USA and others to move toward extreme lockdown measures), and every antibody study has shown an infection death rate for the virus in the same range as ordinary flu. Over 85% of people under age 70 who are exposed never get sick or display symptoms of any kind.
The Covid response has been the biggest fraud ever perpetrated against humanity, destroying far more lives and livelihoods than the virus has or ever will (and extreme lockdowns slow the development of natural herd immunity). Protections for the most vulnerable segments of the population should have been the sane response, not massive lockdowns of healthy people and the destruction of all ordinary day to day life and activities, and the assumption that nothing can ever be normal until a magic vaccine appears courtesy of Big Pharma. Millions of lives and businesses are now destroyed because of exaggerated fears of a virus, and will never come back, and the only ones who will gain are Big Pharma and Wall Street, as usual.
So long story short – there is no reason that not only Australia but everywhere else can’t get back to normal when it comes to sporting events and everything else, if only political leaders would look at actual evidence and listen to people other than those devoted to flawed lockdown models and beholden to Big Pharma and it’s claim that nothing can get back to normal until a vaccine appears (which may never happen, just as there is no effective vaccine for many things).
For what it’s worth, you should check out the journal Quadrant Online, which is Australia-based and has dozens of articles about how Australia in has been especially extremist in its over-reaction to the virus.
Swiss Propaganda Research (swprs.org) is also an invaluable resource.
Dennis, I wouldn’t go deep into this whether the lockdown was worthwhile, to an extent it probably was, but as a healthy individual in my 30s I can say that it did have a negative impact on me, emotionally, physically and financially. It will take me months to get back to normal. Sometimes I did think that we saved a number of lives, but ruined so many at the same time, so that eventually the outcome may be equal when it comes to health, but when it comes to economy a 1000 times worse with the lockdown.
As I understand, the reason we needed such strict measures was because the virus is absolutely new and there was no immunity anywhere, so it shouldn’t be compared with the flu in that sense. Luckily, they say that the virus is much weaker now, so infected people should have only mild symptoms, if any at all.
I’m sorry, but I’ve seen no evidence that the virus is weaker now. And everyone is saying that there will be a second wave of infections when the restrictions are lifted. I think the Australian government has done a good job with only 100 or so people dying instead of tens of thousands like the US or Italy or Spain or the UK.
Essentially what both of you are saying is that old people dying doesn’t matter. I’m young, who cares. Thanks a million. Just hope your mothers and grandmothers don’t get the virus and die. And Quadrant is an extremely right-wing, anti-government, pro big business magazine which no-one much takes seriously and no-one much reads except people who want their own right-wing views reinforced, as presumably are you, Dennis. So obviously we are not going to agree.
That said, it would be interesting to know what proportion of the audience at the Australian Open is overseas visitors and what is locals. I have never got the impression there were that many tourists there, although definitely people from around Australia. But i imagine internal flights at least will be going by then.
CLT, in my country doctors are saying that current new cases of the disease are much milder than those a few weeks ago. As for the second wave, it is not 100% that it will happen. Some epidemiologists believe it will happen but say that it will certainly be in a much milder form, like a common cold, some think it is highly unlikely that we will have the second wave.
I never said that I don’t care if old people are dying, I just said that measures could have possibly been milder (in my country at least, we had several periods of 86 hours of complete lockdown), as it turns out that these strict measures are having a ton of side effects on everyone, including old people who were not allowed to exit their apartments at all for 40-50 days. It all depends on each individual person, not everyone was affected the same way — it’s not the same whether you live in countryside or in a tiny city apartment with 4 more people in your household. Some people were hit really hard — families with autistic children, victims of domestic violence, people who lost their jobs and businesses and now have nothing to support their families, etc. Some people were so panicked by the whole situation that they started taking sedatives.
As for the Australian Open, the audience is not that much of an issue, but what about players, a huge number of them have to make it to Australia somehow. But I’m hopeful and positive about the AO, there’s still a lot of time by then.