Tennis: Live sport will bring digital experiences to stadiums, says Tennis Australia's CEO

MELBOURNE (REUTERS) - Long lines to enter stadiums and queuing for food and drinks will fade away as live sport and entertainment events around the world emerge from the pandemic, Australia's top tennis boss has said.

Two days into hosting one of the first major global sports events to host crowds and international athletes since the coronavirus outbreak, Craig Tiley told Reuters at the Australian Open that premium experiences for fans in the future were going to be all about safety and merging digital experiences with real-life entertainment.

"I think buying your own car and driving your own car, sitting in your own theatre at home, enjoying your own content is going to be much more a thing of the future than it is today, even more so. So our challenge as a sport is, how do we bring people from that environment?" Tiley said in an interview.

Tiley, who is chief executive of Tennis Australia and the tournament director at the Open, said safety protocols will become of utmost importance to the live event industry, as will technology that gives fans quicker entry and a better experience inside stadiums.

"So ticketless entry, very quickly that is going to accelerate across the globe for sports entertainment," he said. "Using your app for access to food and drink will be the same, but access also on your mobile device for all sorts of opportunities for you to serve as a coach, as a critique of the stats, as a predictor of what's going to happen next.

"That's the kind of value add you need to add to fans."

He said also he hoped the Olympics will go ahead - but only if organisers add more rigorous quarantine measures.

Tokyo is expected to welcome 11,000 athletes at the end of July, when it holds the Summer Games postponed from last year because of the virus, but is not currently considering wholesale quarantine for them.

Tiley said his experience of organising the Australian Open suggested the Olympics needed rigorous quarantine measures.

"I've seen the playbook for the Olympics and I've looked at it carefully," he said. "And compared to what we've done, we've had a far more rigorous programme than is being proposed at the Olympics."

It took a gruelling effort by his 600-strong team over the last 11 months to get the year's biggest sporting event so far, the Australian Open, ready for crowds amid the pandemic.

That included ferrying 1,200 players, officials and media on 17 flights from eight countries, arranging 14 days of quarantine and more than 30,000 Covid-19 tests, while limiting any chance for the virus to return to a city that stamped it out with four months of hard lockdown last year.

Despite all that rigour, 10 people still tested positive, forcing the abandonment of a full day of warm-up matches while further testing and isolation measures were adopted.

No new related cases have emerged, but Tiley is aware that there is still a long way to go.

"I love the Olympic Games," he said. "I'd like to see it be successful. But with the experience we had, I cannot see it working."

He suggested that Olympics organisers extend the Games to allow for longer quarantine periods, with athletes training in their own accommodation, such as on a university campus, before staged competition periods for each event.

"There's no such thing as no risk," he added. "But I cannot see it being done any other way, unless you are willing to accept a much higher risk of spreading the virus."

Australia, with a tally of about 28,900 infections and 909 deaths, has proved to be one of the nations most successful in the campaign to restrain the virus.

It had technically eliminated community spread last month, but authorities and citizens are on edge since a spattering of cases that emerged in the past week among hotel workers are thought to be highly infectious strains.

That is believed to be one reason for the low attendance of about 17,650 during the first two days of the tennis championship, amounting to just half the reduced Covid-19 capacity and a quarter of last year's figure.

Longer incubation periods for new strains suggest that quarantine needs to be extended beyond two weeks, Tiley added.

He said he hoped to evolve a model that encourages audiences to attend global sporting events over the next few years, and share his conclusions with others as well as the International Olympic Committee and the Japanese Tennis Association.

"Vaccination is not the silver bullet," he said. "I don't see physical distancing and the wearing of masks and the quarantine going (away) anytime soon."

Melbourne Park has been divided into three distinct zones, with more than 800 dispensers of hand sanitiser installed, in addition to QR code checks, click-and-collect arrangements ffor food and beverages and daily deep cleaning.

Organisers will need to make fans feel safe to entice them to attend, Tiley added.

"I think 2022 is going to be different to 2021, but not much different when it comes to health and the protection of ourselves from each other, because of the spread of the virus."