Players at US Open highlight continued abuse on social media
A post by Caroline Garcia drew reaction from her fellow players, all of whom suffer the same abuse
Caroline Garcia, Roland-Garros 2024
Image Credit: Chryslene Caillaud / Panoramic
It is a subject that won’t go away, and if anything it seems to be getting worse.
In a vivid statement on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Tuesday, France’s Caroline Garcia shared some of the messages she has received from people after losses this year.
“There’s hundreds,” she said. “And now, being 30 years old, although they still hurt, because at the end of the day, I’m just a normal girl working really hard and trying my best, I have tools and have done work to protect myself from this hate. But still, this is not ok.”
Garcia said she was particularly worried about younger players, who are less equipped to handle the abuse, and called on tennis authorities to stop promoting betting companies, whose customers – after losing bets – are often the ones doing the abusing.
Garcia’s tweet drew plenty of reaction from her fellow players. World No 1 Iga Swiatek tweeted: “Thank you for this voice” while Jessica Pegula said: “Yep. The constant death threats and family threats are normal now. Win or lose.”
Russia’s Karen Khachanov, who lost the longest match in US Open history to Dan Evans in the first round after leading 4-0 in the final set, also posted a message on social media, asking fans ‘not to strike a man when he is down’.
Draper says abuse worse for female players
Britain’s Jack Draper was the victim of abuse on Twitter after the incident in Cincinnati earlier this month, accused of cheating after he won the match despite replays showing he had hit the ball into the ground on match point against Felix Auger-Aliassime, only for the umpire to say he had seen nothing wrong.
Draper admitted the incident, especially the reaction and the abuse, had affected him mentally and says he tries to limit his social media use as a result.
“Those days when you’re getting a ton of abuse and people are telling you to go and top yourself, it’s not ideal to go on it all the time,” he told a small group of reporters at Flushing Meadows. “It becomes a problem when you’re on it too much, but I feel like I have a healthy balance with it.
“I think my first pro match in 2018 you know, I think I won love and love and I was a horrible person. They were gonna find my mum. Every match, whether you win or lose, you get, get hundreds of messages from from people and you can’t really stop it. Just go on my latest Instagram account, you’ll probably see about 100 messages with clown emojis and snake and all this sort of stuff in.
“You can’t control it. Everyone has it, and especially the girls. I think the girls get it way worse than the guys as well. I think social media is an amazing tool for players. It’s great that we can interact with fans, with each other, but you kind of realise it’s not all good, and so you’ve got to stay off it when possible.”
mattek-sands: every player suffers from this
Doubles star Bethanie Mattek-Sands said every player was in the same position as Garcia. The American says she no longer reads her messages.
“I remember when I first got married, Justin (her husband) looked at the messages and he was about to go, like, hunt someone down, right?” she said. “And I was like, babe, this happens every week.
“But it’s unfortunate that we have these keyboard warriors that really say pretty atrocious things. I mean, it’s really vile. For the most part it’s people gambling on our matches. I feel like we’ve been voicing it for a little bit. It affects everyone from 100 in the world to top 10 in the world.
“I think my husband found one of the guys that wrote me because his profile was still public, and he had a picture of his family up there, and he just wrote him back. “He was like, ‘I found the IP. I found who you are, I found where you work. I see that you have daughters.’ He was like, ‘I cannot believe that you would have the gall to write something like this to my wife.’ The guy kind of backtracked and said, ‘well, I was just really upset, you know’. But there’s no excuse. I mean, something more should be done, yeah?”
CONFLICTS OF INTERESTS don’t help
At the US Open this year, as at the other three slams, the social media of all players and coaches are monitored for abuse by a company called Threat Matrix, which operates across 35 languages, looking for abusive and threatening content. Additionally, they are invited to sign up to a system that then looks at any direct messages that come in from people they don’t know. If they are abusive, the players will not see them. Support is also offered to those players who are affected.
Like Garcia, Mattek-Sands said the fact that tennis takes money from betting companies, whether through sponsorship or data rights, and that players could not have a betting sponsor, was a conflict of interest that the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) would be looking at.
TIAFOE: DON’T HANG YOUR HEAD LOW
American player Frances Tiafoe said he received all sorts of abuse on social media, too, and had one piece of advice to young players experiencing it for the first time.
“People are saying outlandish shit — sorry — outlandish stuff,” he said. “It’s just wild. You got guys working all their life like trying to compete at the highest level. You don’t know people’s circumstances, what they’re going through, how this affects people.
“But I think the biggest thing I would definitely like to tell players and other colleagues, men and women, like, these people, they’re going to follow your life regardless. So don’t hang your head so low on these things. They’re following your life. You don’t care about anything they do. They’re going to continue to follow your life. You’re the prize, you’re the important person. Be more upset about the loss or tough time you’re actually going through and don’t let your mood get even worse from people you don’t know or care about opinion, like, puts you in the gutter.
“It’s already hard enough. That’s the biggest thing I would say. But again, I’m not going to say it’s an easy thing. Personally I don’t care, it doesn’t bother me, but for people, I get why it bothers them.”
