Player defaulted from Wimbledon girls’ singles after bouncing racket off grass and into crowd
· Yahoo Sports
THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — Some pretty surprising things happened at Wimbledon Saturday, but not many of them could top the the plight of German junior Ida Wobker, a 15-year-old ranked No. 24 in the ITF junior rankings.
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Wobker was having a tough afternoon against Maria Valentina Pop, who was beating her 6-0 5-5 in their first-round match on Court 11. Pop, a Romanian, was rolling through another service game when Bobker whacked an easy backhand beyond the baseline.
Bobker then did what frustrated players of all ages sometimes do on warm sunny afternoons when things aren’t going their way. She fired her racket into the grass behind the baseline.
That’s a no-no at the All England Club, where officials prioritize protecting the grass, and players are regularly penalized if they intentionally release their rackets. Mirra Andreeva was penalized three years ago when she appeared to release her racket on what turned out to be the penultimate point against Madison Keys. She pleaded that the racket had slipped out of her hand, but to no avail, and subsequently lost the match.
There was no question about intention in Bobker’s case, and it got worse from there. The racket rebounded off the turf and into the crowd.
The chair umpire immediately paused the match and called a supervisor onto the court, who was briefed on what had just unfolded. She then went to spectators to see if anyone had been hurt. This is where the gray area of the tennis rules can often come in.
Of late, punishments for defaults, especially those involving thrown or smashed rackets or struck balls, have depended on outcome rather than action. Players sometimes fire balls and rackets into crowds with no control over their actions, but if no one gets hurt, they generally escape with a minor penalty. A significant exception occurred at the French Open in 2023, after Japan’s Miyu Kato accidentally hit a ball kid when softly returning it to her and they began to cry. After her opponents complained, she and her partner Aldila Sutjiadi were defaulted.
Against Nick Kyrgios at Wimbledon in 2022, Stefanos Tsitsipas hammered a ball into the crowd in frustration, but escaped a default because it missed a fan’s head by inches. Alex Michelsen similarly did the same at the Winston-Salem Open in North Carolina and escaped a default for a similar reason. He hit a spectator, but they told the chair umpire, that day Aurélie Tourte, they were OK.
At the 2024 French Open, France’s Térence Atmane followed a similar path. He struck a ball in anger; it hit someone; a supervisor came out; the fan said they were OK. Atmane received a warning.
In Wobker’s case, no one appears to have been hurt, but after several minutes a blue-blazered referee arrived on court to consult with the chair umpire and the referee. He told the chair umpire that the tournament cannot tolerate that sort of behavior.
“Game, set and match,” he told the chair umpire, who subsequently told the crowd that Bobker was receiving a code violation for unsportsmanlike conduct.
“Game, set, and match,” the chair umpire repeated to the crowd.
Wobker, who had waited for the decision from her bench area, gathered her belongings and walked from the court.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women's Tennis
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