Shock rule change may cost pair a title

NEW YORK • For two weeks, all seemed well with the plan to hold the US Open in New York just a few months after the city had become the epicentre for the coronavirus in the Western world.

With a handful of notable exceptions, the best tennis players in the world began arriving last month, nearly all of them housed at a Long Island hotel where they were supposed to comply with strict social distancing rules as they played the Western and Southern Open, the event preceding the hard-court Grand Slam.

Both tournaments were to be held in a "bubble" and the plan that the United States Tennis Association (USTA) had developed closely with city and state public health officials - including barring fans, regular testing, education, behaviour monitoring and contact tracing - appeared to be working.

The organisers thought that they had all the bases covered. Then, two days before the US Open, France's 17th seed Benoit Paire tested positive for the coronavirus.

Electronic contact tracing revealed that he had been in close contact for an extended period - during a card game at the hotel - with seven players, most of them French, including Kristina Mladenovic.

A day after two top men's singles players had to wait 21/2 hours to find out whether they would be able to take the court, tennis officials on Saturday eliminated the top-seeded women's doubles team of Mladenovic and Timea Babos.

Health officials in Nassau County, where the players' hotel is, decided that allowing Mladenovic to play would violate the county's protocols, even though she had been participating at Flushing Meadows all week.

The USTA, which was caught off guard by the county's sudden involvement in the tournament's protocols, said in a statement that it was obligated to comply with the ruling that all of those who had been in close contact with Paire would have to remain alone in their hotel rooms through a quarantine period that ended on Saturday.

It was the third time in less than a week, and the second time in 24 hours, that the rules for players exposed to the virus had changed, with no reason given to explain why the county waited five days after Paire was removed from the draw to enforce its stringent rules.

"We always knew we were going to have to stay vigilant and monitor everything every single day, because we have learnt how quickly things can change in this Covid-19 world that we are now living in," said Chris Widmaier, spokesman for the USTA.

Those words were likely to be little comfort to Mladenovic, who earlier in the week hit out at the organisers, saying the tournament had become a "nightmare" for her.

The doubles world No. 3 did not respond to messages on Saturday, but fourth-ranked doubles player Babos and her coach Michael Joyce - both were not directly affected by the new quarantine rules - have already flown back to their respective homes in Hungary and Florida.

"This probably cost us a Grand Slam," Joyce lamented.

NYTIMES