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    Women’s Tennis Tour Approves Deal for Pay Equity by 2033

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    The WTA Tour approved a plan to achieve pay equity at its biggest tournaments. But it won’t be fully implemented until 2033.The women’s professional tennis tour took another step on Tuesday toward closing the gender pay gap, as players and tournament officials committed to bringing their prize money in line with the men for the most significant tournaments, though the shift won’t be complete for 10 years.The move came after months of negotiations within the WTA Tour, which includes tournament organizers, as well as years of complaints from players and foot-dragging by tournament officials who for decades have paid female professionals a fraction of what they pay the men even in tournaments where they play the same best-of-three-sets format.In Rome, in May, the men competed for $8.5 million while the women competed for $3.9 million. The Western & Southern Open, the main tuneup for the U.S. Open, paid men $6.28 million while women competed for $2.53 million. The National Bank Open in Canada offered the men $5.9 million last year, compared with $2.53 million for the women.“More and more players have been getting restless with this,” said Jessica Pegula, the world’s fourth-ranked player and a member of the WTA Players’ Council. “Equal pay started with the Slams, and I think a lot of people thought that meant every tournament.”Women and men have received equal prize money at all of the Grand Slam tournaments since 2007. As part of this deal, organizers of the next two tiers of tournaments — the 1000-level tournaments, which are the biggest competitions outside of the Grand Slams, and the 500-level tournaments — have committed to pay equity as well.All events featuring both men and women at those two levels will pay prize money equal to that on the men’s tour, the ATP, beginning in 2027. By 2033, all events at those two levels will offer the same prize money.Tour executives and tournament officials say the phased-in approach is essential for raising the additional revenue to fund the pay increases, but that has not sat well with all players.“I don’t know why it’s not equal right now,” Paula Badosa of Spain, who has been ranked as high as No. 2 in the world, said last month.Sloane Stephens, another Players’ Council member, said she understands the impatience of players who don’t want this benefit to kick in only after they have retired, but there are many existing contracts that prevent an immediate shift.“It may not be the fastest pathway, but we will get there,” she said. “If I wasn’t on the council, it would be hard for me to understand. This process takes time.”In an interview this spring, Steven Simon, the chief executive of the WTA Tour, said the time frame is necessary to allow the market to catch up with player sentiment, as the tour expands its marketing and renegotiates existing media contracts. Tournament organizers will also be able to take advantage of new rules that will make player attendance essentially mandatory at the biggest tournaments. Tournament organizers have long used the lack of a mandatory attendance requirement and a slight difference in the number of rankings points that players received as excuses for not providing equal pay. All of the tournaments with men and women will also now offer the same rankings points for both, making the competitions equal in every way and less confusing for fans.But while the pay equity deal offers an eventual solution to an old problem for tennis — and in all sports — it is hardly a panacea. With Wimbledon set to begin on Monday, women’s tennis continues to grapple with challenges.“I don’t know why it’s not equal right now,” Paula Badosa has said about the gap between men’s and women’s prize money at most tournaments.Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via ShutterstockMost immediately, the tour has yet to announce the location of its season-ending tour finals in November. That issue was supposed to have been settled after the tour announced earlier this year that it would end its 18-month suspension of operations in China over the country’s treatment of the former player Peng Shuai. In a social media post in 2021, Shuai accused a government official of sexually assaulting her, and tour officials were subsequently unable to contact her.Simon said its boycott proved ineffective. But when the tour released its fall calendar earlier this month, it gave no location for the finals, though it included several tournaments in China. Tour officials have said they intend to hold the event there, but negotiations are continuing with the Chinese over the details of its existing 10-year deal that guaranteed nearly $150 million in prize money.There is also the larger issue of whether the WTA Tour will be able to further unify with the men’s tour, a move that experts say is vital for maximizing the potential of pro tennis. And looming over all of this is what role, if any, Saudi Arabia may play in the sport.Saudi Arabia, whose LIV Golf circuit recently agreed to a merger with golf’s PGA Tour, already hosts a lucrative men’s exhibition event, but so far it has shown an inclination to grow its investments in tennis without the acrimony and litigation that accompanied its aggressive push into golf.Saudi Arabia is a leading candidate to become the host of the ATP’s Next Gen Finals, a season-ending 21-and-under tournament that has been held in Milan since its inception in 2017, according to people with knowledge of the bidding process. The proposal to stage the competition, beginning later this year, includes a plan to launch a similar women’s event.The WTA has yet to commit to that or to staging any competitions in Saudi Arabia, where women only recently gained the right to drive and where an abysmal human rights record includes the murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Simon traveled to the kingdom earlier this year for talks with government officials, though it’s not clear whether the WTA’s idea of further unification with the ATP includes a new tournament in Saudi Arabia.For now, erasing the pay gap is the first step, though some players do not understand the slow pace of change.“I don’t see why we have to wait,” Ons Jabeur of Tunisia, who is ranked No. 6, said recently.In response, Simon has pointed to the deal the tour struck earlier this year with CVC Capital Partners, a private equity firm, which bought 20 percent of a WTA commercial subsidiary for $150 million. Much of the investment will be used to enhance sales and marketing efforts at a time when many of its players remain unknown to casual sports fans.Doing that may require some work on the part of the tournaments that goes beyond giving women more money.“We have to build these personalities,” Simon said.Women in tennis have also been increasingly vocal in recent months about the disparate treatment they have received. At the French Open, organizers put a men’s match in the featured prime-time slot on nine of 10 nights.The mixed tournaments almost always conclude with the men’s final on the last Sunday — an implicit peak — with the women’s final played the day before. At the Italian Open in May, Elena Rybakina and Anhelina Kalinina took the court at 11 p.m. local time in a largely empty stadium after rain and the men’s semifinals delayed their match for hours.After Tuesday’s announcement, at least the money will be equal — eventually.“It’s time for change,” Simon said. “The pathway is now there.” More

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      WTA Lifts Suspension on Tournaments in China

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      The tour had paused events there after concerns about the Chinese star Peng Shuai went unresolved, but Steve Simon, its chief executive, said a different approach was needed.The WTA will resume operating tournaments in China later this year after having suspended events there in late 2021 because of concerns about the Chinese player Peng Shuai.The return, announced Thursday, is also a retreat.When Peng, one of China’s biggest tennis stars, accused a former top Chinese government official of sexual assault in a social media post in November 2021, the WTA and Steve Simon, its chairman and chief executive, took a strong stance.The WTA called for a “full and transparent” inquiry into Peng’s allegations, which were quickly censored online in China, and requested an opportunity to speak with her directly. The following month, the WTA suspended its Chinese tournaments and announced that the tour would not return until its demands were met.Sixteen months later, faced with a stalemate, the WTA has effectively blinked.“We’re currently convinced that the requests that we put forth are not going to be met,” Simon said in an interview this week. “And, with that, to continue with the same strategy doesn’t seem to make sense, and we need a different approach. Our members believe it’s time to resume our mission in China, where we believe we can continue to make a positive difference, as I think we have over the last 20 years when we’ve been there, while at the same time making sure that Peng is not forgotten and that we can, by returning, make some progress.”The WTA’s suspension of Chinese tournaments was more symbolic than substantive. China canceled nearly all international sports events in 2021 and in 2022 in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Even without the WTA suspension, there almost certainly would have been no tour events in the country in 2022.But in a landscape in which global sports leaders have often kowtowed to China and its economic clout, the WTA’s move in 2021 still sent a strong message and made the tour an outlier. The men’s tennis tour, the ATP, did not follow suit and never suspended any of its Chinese events, including the Masters 1000 tournament in Shanghai. With Chinese authorities lifting their pandemic-related restrictions, it is scheduled to be played this year for the first time since 2019.Through the years, China has become a more important market for the WTA than for the ATP. The women’s tour held nine events in China in 2019, accounting for approximately one-third of the WTA’s annual revenue. The most significant of those tournaments was the season-ending WTA Finals in Shenzhen, which awarded a record $14 million in prize money in 2019, the first year of a lucrative 10-year deal.The tour, which has long relied heavily on revenue from the WTA Finals, took big financial hits when the event was canceled in 2020 and then moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2021 and to Fort Worth in 2022. In Guadalajara and Fort Worth, the WTA had to pay the significantly lower prize money figure, $5 million, itself.Simon said the tour will resume play in China in September. Though the schedule is not yet complete, he said he expected to hold eight tournaments there this year: regular tour events in Zhengzhou, Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanchang, Hong Kong and Wuhan; the WTA Elite Trophy in Zhuhai; and the Finals, which Simon indicated would be staged in Shenzhen through 2031 to fulfill the original 10-year commitment.Simon said several of the events outside China that filled the late-season gap in 2022 will remain on the tour’s fall schedule this year, including tournaments in San Diego, Guadalajara and also in Tunisia.Last year’s WTA Finals was held in Fort Worth. The tournament will return to Shenzhen, China, this year, Steve Simon, the WTA chief executive, said.Cj Gunther/EPA, via ShutterstockThe WTA has faced major financial headwinds since the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, with its overall prize money falling even further behind the men’s tour. Last month, the WTA announced a commercial partnership with CVC Capital Partners, a global private equity firm, which will make a $150 million investment in the tour.The return to China will further bolster the WTA’s finances, but Simon rejected the suggestion that the decision was all about the bottom line.“This decision wasn’t made based upon the Finals deal in any way, shape or form,” Simon said. “It was based upon what was in the best interest of the organization, and we felt this was in that best interest. Will it be good for our balance sheet and those types of things, yes it will, but that wasn’t the basis for the decision.”Simon said it was also important to women’s sports that women’s tennis have a presence in China, where the game has grown since the success of the women’s star Li Na, the first Grand Slam singles champion from China.Peng, who disappeared from public view for several weeks after posting her initial allegations in 2021, has since reappeared, including a meeting with the International Olympic Committee’s president, Thomas Bach, during the Beijing Games in February 2022. She has also given interviews to international media, claiming that she had been misunderstood and had not actually made sexual assault allegations.But the WTA has continued to question whether she is able to speak freely. Though Simon said the WTA has remained unable to establish direct contact with Peng, he said the tour has received assurances from “people close to Peng in the area that she is safe and living with her family in Beijing.”Despite the public standoff between the WTA and the Chinese government, Simon said that officials from the sport’s national governing body had provided the WTA with assurances that “our athletes and staff will be safe when they are in China.”The move back to China comes at a moment of rising political tension between China and the West, but other international events, including track and field’s Diamond League and the Asian Games, a multisport competition, are also returning to the country this year. Simon said the WTA had polled its players ahead of the decision.“We obviously had some players who were not supportive of a return, but the majority said it’s time to go back,” Simon said.Some tennis officials believed that Simon and the WTA had overreached by demanding a Chinese investigation into Peng’s accusations as a condition of lifting the suspension. However, the WTA also received widespread plaudits for its strong stance from human rights organizations and others. Last week, Yaqiu Wang, a senior China researcher with Human Rights Watch, urged the WTA to hold firm on its suspension.“If it’s reversed, the message really is the WTA eventually succumbed to business and to profit and the WTA is no different to other businesses,” Wang told Reuters.Does Simon feel the WTA is now letting people down?“We’re proud of the position we took,” he said. “If I had to make the decision over again, I would have made the same one, no question about it. We do think that people understand we took on a very difficult issue. We’ve done our best to get the results fulfilled, but unfortunately we have not been able to accomplish everything we wanted to. But we’ve also been able to make sure Peng is safe and secure, and she isn’t being forgotten or left behind. Things have to evolve. You can’t keep doing the same thing if it’s not working.” More

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      in Soccer

      China’s Soccer Experiment Flopped. Now It May Be Over.

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      China poured billions into its bid to become a major player in the world’s most popular sport. A decade later, it has little to show for that investment.It takes only a glance at the news coverage from those days less than a decade ago, when China’s soccer success seemed only a matter of determination and money, to remember how quickly and how deeply the country embraced the world’s most popular sport as a national project.At home and abroad, China’s president, Xi Jinping, was pictured kicking soccer balls and watching youth matches. State media detailed his lifelong love of the game. Schools were ordered to introduce soccer into their curriculums, and billions of dollars were earmarked for the construction of tens of thousands of fields. Major companies rushed to invest in professional teams, both at home and abroad, then stocked them with imported players — whatever the cost.There was talk of bringing the World Cup to China. In Beijing, there was audacious talk of winning it.Now, though, China’s great soccer dream appears to be over.The expensive recruits have gone. Top teams have disappeared with alarming regularity. The national team shows little sign of improvement. And in perhaps the most direct sign of a failed policy, some of the top officials charged with leading China’s soccer revolution have been detained amid allegations of corruption.“The hopes were really high,” said Liu Dongfeng, a professor at the school of economics and management at the Shanghai University of Sport. “And that is also why the disappointment is so big.”“My biggest hope for Chinese soccer is that its teams become among the world’s best,” China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had declared in 2015.Pool photo by Michael SohnWhat derailed China’s soccer plan, when earlier state-backed bids to dominate Olympic sports had delivered regular glory and piles of medals? A global pandemic and an economic downturn didn’t help. Nor did the lack of truly world-class talents. Then there were the bad deals, the whispers of corruption and the nagging national inability to succeed in team sports. Whatever the reasons, the current malaise infecting Chinese soccer is a major reversal from the momentum that accompanied the release in 2015 of China’s 50-point plan for the sport.That program was packed with concrete targets and lofty goals. Perhaps the most eye-catching was a directive to include soccer in the national school curriculum — introducing it to tens of millions of children in a single stroke — and to set up 50,000 soccer schools in the country by 2025. Eager to support Xi’s ambitions, or perhaps just as eager to take advantage of a loosening of restrictions on the purchase of foreign assets, Chinese investors quickly opened a fire hose of money on the game.Riding the RocketBillions of dollars went to acquiring whole or partial stakes in European soccer teams. Chinese companies signed up as FIFA sponsors and put their names on the message boards and shirts of well-known clubs. At home, some of China’s richest people and companies invested in teams with an abandon that transformed the country’s top division, the Super League, into a major player in the global transfer market. Players who once would never have considered a career in China were suddenly racing there, lured by eye-popping salaries or eight-figure transfer fees that their European and South American clubs simply couldn’t afford to pass up.That sudden burst of spending spooked Chinese regulators, who belatedly imposed restraints on the industry to try to stop it from overheating. Yet even those moves failed to tame the worst excesses, and by the time the coronavirus pandemic descended in early 2020, and China retreated inside its borders, spectacular failures were common.Jiangsu Suning F.C., a team owned by one of China’s richest men, disappeared in early 2021, only months after winning the Super League title. Other teams followed suit; Guangzhou F.C. suffered the indignity of relegation after its big-spending owner, the property developer Evergrande, tumbled into its own financial crisis. Top players, complaining of unpaid salaries and broken promises, packed their bags, ended their contracts and headed home.An academy at Jiangsu Suning F.C. in 2021, weeks after the club, the reigning league champion, suddenly shut down.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“From the perspective of each team, if you look at cost and revenue, it was not sustainable at all,” Liu said.But China was in retreat on the international stage, too.Dashed HopesIf there were a single indicator of the high hopes, and supreme disappointment, of China’s soccer dream it might be its perpetually underachieving men’s national team, which currently sits below the likes of Oman, Uzbekistan and Gabon in FIFA’s global rankings, firmly entrenched among the mediocre and the afterthoughts.The team’s current ranking is almost exactly the same position it held when the panel chaired by Xi passed China’s heralded soccer reform plan eight years ago, and its most recent World Cup qualifying campaign was merely another humbling failure. China finished fifth out of six teams in its qualifying pool for last year’s tournament in Qatar, a defeat to Vietnam on Chinese New Year the nadir to a journey marked by repeated humiliations.Traditionally, China has enjoyed far more success in women’s soccer. It was an early pioneer in the women’s game, hosted FIFA’s first women’s world championship in 1991 and reached the final eight years later. But while China will make its third straight trip to the Women’s World Cup this year, it has not advanced past the quarterfinals since 1999 and will not be a pick of most experts to contend for the trophy.The men’s team’s future looks even less bright. “If anything, they’re only going to get worse the way things are right now,” said Mark Dreyer, the author of a book on China’s efforts to become a sporting superpower.China’s men’s team has never won a game or even scored a goal at the World Cup.Elias Rodriguez/Photosport, via Associated PressThe news is no better off the field. FIFA was forced to abandon its plan to hold the inaugural edition of an expanded World Cup for clubs in China after the country imposed some of the world’s strictest coronavirus restrictions. That event, unveiled at a triumphant news conference in Shanghai, will now be held in 2025, but it is unlikely to take place in China.Last year, the Asian soccer federation scrapped a multibillion-dollar television contract with a Chinese media company after it failed to fulfill its agreements. The Premier League did the same in 2020, tearing up a deal that was its most lucrative overseas contract, and has now signed one worth considerably less.The money that flowed from Chinese companies to foreign entities in the early years of the boom, and which quickly made China a major source of sponsorship income for teams, leagues and federations around the world, has been replaced by money from the Gulf, and particularly from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which now have the profile that China once sought.At a recent meeting of Asian soccer’s governing body, the Chinese candidate running for a seat on FIFA’s governing council finished last in the voting.Uncertain FutureAmong the many successes China once promised are some claims that cannot be verified. The official in charge of the schools project, for example, once claimed that 30,000 such academies had been opened, and that more than 55 million students were now playing soccer.“While most of the world celebrates a project once it is completed, in China they like to celebrate the announcement, throw out crazy numbers and then people accept that as given,” said Dreyer, who has spent more than a decade following the Chinese soccer industry.China invested in soccer schools and soccer fields but never created a pipeline of players.Gilles Sabrié for The New York TimesIt is unclear how many of the schools are actually functioning, and getting an answer may be all but impossible: The education ministry official who made the claims, Wang Dengfeng, was arrested in February.His detention was not the first, or the last. Li Tie, a former player who coached the national team during part of its failed World Cup campaign, was arrested over unspecified “serious violations of law” while attending a coaching seminar in November. Then, in February, the Communist Party’s antigraft watchdog issued a curt statement in which it said Chen Xuyuan, the president of the national soccer federation, was facing similar accusations.After Chen’s arrest, Hu Xijin, a nationalist and retired chief editor of The Global Times, a Communist Party tabloid, lamented the sorry state of the country’s soccer program on Chinese social media. Chinese soccer had burned copious amounts of cash and “completely humiliated the Chinese people” with its scandals, Hu said.Even before a series of government announcements noting that even more high-ranking soccer officials were under investigation, Hu suggested that Chinese men’s soccer was “rotten to the core.”His post went viral, with many commenters calling desperately for a complete overhaul of Chinese soccer. Whether the country, and particularly Xi and the rest of China’s leadership, will rally so publicly behind another effort is unclear.A previous anticorruption drive that included the jailing of soccer administrators and officials presaged the start of the latest efforts to grow the sport. The latest arrests and detentions, Liu said, might be a sign of the government’s willingness to persevere.Chen Xuyuan, the president of China’s soccer federation, in 2019. He is facing accusations of corruption.SNTV, via Associated PressThe former national team coach Li Tie faces similar accusations: “serious violations of law.”Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe director of China’s national sports agency, Gao Zhidan, appeared to suggest just that recently. At a press event after China’s annual legislative session on March 12, when soccer was conspicuous by its absence at a meeting on sports, Gao said he had been “deeply reflecting on the serious problems in the soccer industry” and declared that his agency would redouble its efforts at building competitive leagues and promoting young talent.What that will look like remains unclear. There is still no official start date for the new season, which is expected to be in April with a reduced number of teams. Among the casualties was Hebei, which not so long ago had lured Argentine stars like Javier Mascherano and Ezequiel Lavezzi, and Zibo Cuju, a team based in a city once recognized by FIFA as “the cradle of the earliest forms of football.”A downsized league will signal yet another rollback of Chinese grand ambitions, whenever it eventually begins. When will that be? No one is certain. An official announcement of the league format has yet to be made.Chang Che More

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      in Golf

      Golf Course or Housing? A Patch of Green Divides Hong Kong

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      The dispute over one of the city’s golf clubs exposes rare political friction for the elite in the new Hong Kong, where the establishment is torn between defending wealth and following Beijing’s wishes.On an autumn afternoon at the Hong Kong Golf Club, hundreds of dogs — pugs, Pomeranians, Shiba Inus — strolled the verdant grounds with their owners in tow, enjoying rare access to the range that charges new members a $2 million entry fee.But these impeccable greens, in the northern reaches of Hong Kong, have become an unlikely battleground.The Hong Kong Golf Club has been fighting a government proposal to carve out less than one-fifth of its 172 acres of land and redevelop it for public housing. The open day for dogs was an effort by the club to rally public support to the club members’ cause in a city known for its soaring inequality and acute shortage of affordable homes.Hong Kong’s government has come under pressure from Beijing to reduce the wealth gap in line with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s promises of “common prosperity.” But the land dispute puts on picturesque display the tensions between Hong Kong’s attempts to redistribute wealth and the interests of the elite who the government has long relied upon for support. The city’s business leaders may be aligned with China’s Communist Party rulers, but many are also stubbornly protective of Hong Kong’s capitalist wealth.The club has mobilized members to speak out about the public housing plan. Prominent figures in the city’s pro-Beijing political establishment have also criticized the proposal.“I hope nobody calls the golf club rich and powerful or pins that label on it. Because it is a sport facility after all,” said Regina Ip, a senior adviser to the Hong Kong government and a golf club member herself.A golfer at the course in 2018.Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York TimesBy contrast, Hong Kong newspapers closely aligned with Beijing — eager to push the territory even closer ideologically to China’s Communist Party — have criticized the club, accusing it of ignoring the needs of working people.“If the golf course development plan is thwarted, the public impression of ‘business colluding with government officials’ will only get worse,” one of the newspapers, Ta Kung Pao, said in an editorial after an environmental review in August effectively delayed the housing plan.It’s not just avid golfers who are stirring opposition to the land swap. Some members of Hong Kong’s business elite see the city government’s plans to claim 32 acres of club land as dangerous government meddling in the economy.More on ChinaCrackdown on Protesters: The protests against China’s restrictive “zero Covid” policy were a rare rebuke of Xi Jinping’s rule. Now, Beijing seems intent on deterring those who might have been emboldened by them.A Harsh Winter: For many people across China, a shortage of natural gas and alarmingly cold temperatures are making a difficult season unbearable.Real Estate: With China’s real estate boom coming to a sudden halt, many Chinese homebuyers have been left with dashed dreams, empty bank accounts and unfinished homes.Solomon Islands: For years, Beijing has thrown its wealth and weight across the globe. But its mixed results in this South Pacific nation calls into question its approach to expanding its power.“A feature of capitalism is a gap between rich and poor,” said Shih Wing Ching, the owner of Centaline property, the biggest property agency in Hong Kong, who has taken up the golf club’s cause, though he does not play himself. “If you try to erase the feature, say by taking away golf, then it’s not capitalism, it’s socialism.”As a youth, Mr. Shih, 73, was a zealous leftist student who took part in the 1967 labor protests that turned into anti-government riots and were inspired by Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which sought to trample traditional privilege. The chaos and trauma of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China eventually turned Mr. Shih against communism, and he later found success selling real estate.“Deng Xiaoping once said that the horses would keep on racing and the dancers would keep on dancing,” Mr. Shih said, citing a comment the Chinese leader made ahead of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 to suggest Hong Kong would not lose its capitalist verve. “If the horses still race and dancers still dance, then I’d add that the golfers should keep on swinging.”Both sides in the fight recognize that the small section of the golf club that might be claimed by the government would make barely a dent Hong Kong’s housing crisis.For more than 10 years, Hong Kong has been recognized by some yardsticks as having the world’s most unaffordable housing market, particularly when comparing median household income to median housing costs.Even Mr. Xi, China’s leader, has weighed in on Hong Kong’s housing woes.“Currently, the biggest aspiration of Hong Kong people is to lead a better life, in which they will have more decent housing,” Mr. Xi said on the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China in July. He urged the government to carry out reforms and “break the barriers of vested interests.”China’s leader, Xi Jinping, giving a speech in Hong Kong in 2022 to inaugurate the city’s new leader, John Lee. Mr. Xi has focused attention on the city’s housing shortage.Pool photo by Selim ChtaytiSome pro-establishment politicians have argued that by targeting the golf club, the government is sowing greater hostility between rich and the poor.Lau Chi-pang, a legislator on the influential elections committee, was criticized by Chinese state media for appearing in the golf club’s YouTube video stream praising the club. Mr. Lau, a history professor who was commissioned by the club to write a book about it, said it had “rich cultural value.”“If public housing is built on the golf course, it will become a political monument,” he said, adding that if housing advocates win the battle they will “then aim at other private clubs.”The dispute over the course began in 2018, when Hong Kong’s government solicited public input on where to acquire land for public housing, and a few pro-democracy legislators raised the idea of taking back land from the golf club. The land is owned by the government, which has leased it to the club since 1911.Polls showed that 60 percent of the public supported the plan. But with the business sector strongly opposing the proposal, the government decided to develop only 32 out of the club’s 172 acres.Golf carts at the Hong Kong Golf Club. The club’s members have rallied against the city’s plans to use part of the course’s property for new housing.Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York TimesMr. Lau argued that there is other land available for development, especially along the northern area bordering Shenzhen in mainland China, which is more important to Beijing than a few buildings on a golf course.Late last year, the city received over 6,000 letters from golf club members and others opposing the plan. Their arguments ranged from one-sentence declarations — “I want to play golf!” — to a 500-page long petition listing the golf course’s historic value and the significance of the Hong Kong Open, a prominent international tournament long held at the club.The dispute has become tied up with the combustible mix of Hong Kong’s crackdown, as opponents of the land swap — even those aligned with Beijing — test the limits of free expression. Some pro-Beijing district councilors have objected to the housing plan, warning of traffic jams and a lack of infrastructure to support the influx of new residents. One councilor even openly declared in a meeting that opponents of the plan would “rise and attack” should it go forward, a bold statement in Hong Kong with a national security law curtailing political dissent.Further complicating matters is that several former legislators who proposed using the golf course land for housing have either been arrested on national security charges or gone into self-imposed exile. Grassroots organizations pushing for more public housing have voiced increasing frustration over the delays.“If the government walks back from the decision, there will be little authority in the future,” said Man Yu-ming, the chairman of the pro-establishment Federation of Public Housing Estates. “We’re not giving up any land we deserve!”John Lee, the city’s top leader, who was appointed in July, recently said he respected the housing plan, which was conceived of during his predecessor’s administration.The delays are a sharp contrast to how Hong Kong’s neighbor across the border in mainland China, Shenzhen, has handled its land shortage. That city, an economic hub of more than 17 million people, tapped several golf courses for urban development in recent years. Some deem the Shenzhen government decisive and resolute. Others don’t.“A debate about this reflects the healthy society of Hong Kong,” said Ronny Tong, an adviser to the government. “Ultimately, it’s an issue of two competing values.”Mr. Tong, a golf club member, has argued that golf courses attract professionals and investors to Hong Kong.“I play golf all the time,” Mr. Tong said. “It’s not a sin.” More

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      in Tennis

      At the Australian Open, Shang Juncheng Leads Wave of Talent From China

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      Shang, once the world’s top-ranked junior, Wu Yibing and Zhang Zhizhen played men’s singles in Melbourne, the first time three men from China are competing at a Grand Slam in the Open era.MELBOURNE, Australia — Shang Juncheng could have chosen his father’s sport of soccer or his mother’s sport of table tennis. His father, Shang Yi, was a leading Chinese midfielder, good enough to play for the national team. His mother, Wu Na, was a world champion in doubles.Instead, their son became a tennis player, leaving home in Beijing at age 11 to train at an academy in Florida.On Monday in Melbourne, it looked as if he had made a wise choice. Shang, a 17-year-old qualifier and the youngest player in the men’s draw, showed rare skill and maturity as he made his Grand Slam tournament debut and became the first Chinese man to win an Australian Open singles match in the Open era.He did it with a gritty, often pretty victory, 6-2, 6-4, 6-7 (2), 7-5, on opening day over Oscar Otte, an unseeded 29-year-old German with a booming serve and a full beard. Shang, who will face the American Frances Tiafoe in the second round, did it on Court 13 with hundreds of fans packed into the grandstand and shouting encouragement in Mandarin and English.“I felt like I was playing at home,” he said.Shang, nicknamed Jerry, speaks both languages fluently after spending so much of his youth in the United States. Though he was interested in soccer in his early years, he said his mother suggested tennis because she believed there were fewer injuries. Shang first played on an indoor hardcourt in Beijing and said he liked it from the start.“For me, the main goal was to become a professional tennis player, even when I was 6 or 7 years old,” he said in an interview. “We started practicing in China in Beijing. That’s where I started on an indoor hardcourt, and my dad used to play soccer in Spain, so he really liked the system and the way the Spanish athletes work.”But instead of basing themselves in Spain, the family chose for Shang to train at the Emilio Sanchez Academy operated by the former Spanish ATP player Emilio Sanchez in Naples, Fla.The 2023 Australian OpenThe year’s first Grand Slam tennis tournament runs from Jan. 16 to Jan. 29 in Melbourne.Missing Stars: Carlos Alcaraz, Naomi Osaka and Nick Kyrgios have all pulled out of the tournament. Alcaraz’s withdrawal means that the Australian Open will be without the men’s No. 1 singles player.Holger Rune’s Rise: Last year, the 19-year-old broke into the top 10, but not without some unwanted attention. We spoke to the young Dane ahead of his second Australian Open.Ben Shelton Goes Global: The 20-year-old American is ranked in the top 100 after a late-season surge last year. Now, he is embarking on his first full season on tour.A Waiting Game: Tennis matches can last a long time. Here’s how players waiting to take the court for the next match stay sharp.Shang later moved to IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., a longtime hub of the game, and he is managed by IMG, the agency that represents several other Chinese players, including Li Na, who is retired.Li became the first Chinese Grand Slam singles champion, winning the 2011 French Open and then the 2014 Australian Open. The Chinese men have long lagged behind, and progress has been slow. In 2013 at the Australian Open, Wu Di became the first Chinese man to play in a major tournament in the Open era. It took nearly a decade for a Chinese man to win a singles match in a major.Zhang Zhizhen of China was set to face Ben Shelton of the United States on Monday at the Australian Open.William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut Shang, once the world’s top-ranked junior, is the youngest member of a promising new wave that includes Wu Yibing, 23, and Zhang Zhizhen, 26.All three were in the main draw this year in Melbourne. It is the first time three Chinese men have played singles in the same major in the Open era, which began in 1968.On Monday, while Shang was breaking through on Court 13, Wu was on adjacent Court 14, playing grinding rallies with Corentin Moutet of France before losing in five sets.Wu, who also trains at IMG Academy, reached the third round of last year’s U.S. Open, where Zhang lost in the first round. Now Shang, a dynamic left-hander who looks like the most promising talent of the group, has joined them at this level.“Now we have three players in the top 200, and I’m happy that I’m one of them,” Shang said. “The other two are like older brothers to me and have been on the tour a lot longer than me. We do practice a lot, and we do speak about how the game is right now and how we can push forward to a higher ranking. For me, each step is a learning step right now. I’m in a young stage of my career, only my second year playing professional tennis. So, for me, it’s just watching how they do things, like we’ve also watched Li Na and how she did things.”Shang wears an earring in his left ear.“That’s something my dad had for a long time,” he said. “When I was around 10 years old, I was like, ‘I want to be like dad,’ and so we went to get it together. I’ve had it for a long time.”Shang said his parents nicknamed him Jerry when he was very young after the mouse in the Tom and Jerry cartoons.“Tom was the one always getting in trouble and Jerry was the smart one, so they thought it was better to choose Jerry,” Shang said.He plays tennis cleverly, changing gears and speeds often to avoid giving opponents a consistent rhythm. But his top gear is impressive, particularly when he is dictating terms with his quick-strike forehand. Against Otte, he showed some deft volleying touch, as well as plenty of composure: avoiding the temptation to rush between points and gathering himself. He finished off the victory with a bold, leaping backhand winner.Shang won his first-round match with a performance that was both gritty and pretty.Fazry Ismail/EPA, via Shutterstock“He’s a complete player,” said his new coach, Dante Bottini. “He can read the court and the game very well, so that’s what surprised me the most when I started working with him. He knows a lot about the game for someone at his age.”Bottini coached the Japanese star Kei Nishikori and worked more recently with the Chilean Nicolás Jarry and the Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov, both of whom sometimes practiced with Shang at IMG Academy.Bottini began coaching Shang in the preseason after being recruited by Li Xi, Shang’s primary agent, a former Chinese player who was on the women’s team at the University of Virginia and was sitting courtside on Monday in a bucket hat next to Shang’s father, Yi.Shang has had no shortage of coaches in his short career, including Marcelo Ríos, the former No. 1 from Chile who worked with Shang for a brief period last year. Though Shang won his first Challenger title in Lexington, Ky., during their collaboration, they soon split.“It was sad it didn’t work out in the end, but he did bring things to my game,” Shang said.Once ranked No. 1 on the ATP Tour, Ríos, like Shang, is a left-hander, but Shang said his biggest source of inspiration has been another left-handed No. 1: Rafael Nadal.Shang first saw him play in person at the men’s ATP event in Beijing, and though Shang said he had not returned to China since he was 14 because of the coronavirus pandemic, he is eager to play there again once the country, which is reopening, allows international tournaments like the Beijing event or the Masters 1000 in Shanghai to resume.“It would be great to play at home in China,” he said.For now, considering the supportive atmosphere on Monday, he will have to settle for playing at home in Australia, but he should face a bigger challenge on Wednesday in Tiafoe, a U.S. Open semifinalist last year who is seeded No. 16 in Melbourne. “Jerry’s obviously having a great tournament, but we need to keep his feet on the ground,” Bottini said. “He has a lot of potential, as we can all see, but we need to go little by little. I think he has a big career ahead of him.” More

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      WTA Chief Talks Money, China and Why Tennis Needs More Female Coaches

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      Even without China’s “zero-Covid” policy, Steve Simon said that unresolved concerns about Peng Shuai would keep women’s tennis away from Shenzhen and a lucrative 10-year-deal to stage the Finals.FORT WORTH — The WTA Finals, the elite season-ending women’s tennis tournament, was supposed to take place in Shenzhen, China, for 10 years and fill the WTA’s coffers.It has not worked out as planned.China’s “zero-Covid” policy continues to keep nearly all international sports events out of the country. Even if China did reopen, women’s tennis has suspended all tournaments in the country, once one of its key markets, because of unresolved concerns about the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, who last year accused a former top Chinese government official of sexual assault.“We’ve made a strong stand, and we stand behind that stance, and we’re not going to compromise our principles,” Steve Simon, the WTA’s chairman and chief executive, said in an interview. “Clearly when we did it, we understood eyes wide open what it could mean.”Last year’s WTA Finals were moved to Guadalajara, Mexico. This year’s event, which was scheduled to finish on Monday night, was staged on short notice at the 14,000-seat Dickies Arena in Fort Worth with attendance that built from woefully low early in the tournament to modest, but enthusiastic, crowds of close to 6,000 in some of the later sessions.Some coaches and players, including No. 1 Iga Swiatek, said they understood the challenges but were disappointed with the turnout. Swiatek, who was defeated by the seventh-ranked Aryna Sabalenka in the semifinals on Sunday, also cited the big gap in prize money between the WTA Finals, which offers $5 million, and the equivalent men’s tournament, the ATP Finals, which starts Sunday in Turin, Italy, and will offer an event record $14.75 million. The 2019 WTA Finals, the only time the tournament was held so far in Shenzhen, offered $14 million in prize money, which was $5 million more than the 2019 men’s event in London.“It’s just pretty sad the WTA kind of got hit by Covid and by not having the place to play before and organize everything properly,” Swiatek said. “But on the other hand, you have an example in the ATP that they were able to do everything and even increase the prize money. So, hopefully for next time, we’re going to be kind of more prepared.”But the ATP did not bank as heavily on China, and at this stage it seems unlikely the WTA will soon return to the country where it staged nine tournaments in 2019. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, doubled down on the “zero Covid” policy last month, and Simon reaffirmed in Fort Worth that the tour’s suspension of tournaments in China will not be lifted until there is a credible and transparent inquiry into Peng’s allegations, which were made in November 2021 on her Chinese social media account, as well as a chance for tour officials to communicate with her independently.“We’re still in the same place,” Simon said. “If they come forward with something else we should look at, of course we are open to it. But we haven’t seen it so far. I’m hopeful we do find a resolution. That’s the goal, to find the right resolution. What’s the truth? Then we can move forward.”Peng, a 2014 U.S. Open singles semifinalist who made public appearances during the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February, has since recanted the assault allegations, citing a misunderstanding. Now 36, she announced her retirement earlier this year. But the WTA remains unconvinced that she is able to act and speak freely and it has still not been able to make direct contact with her.“We know she’s safe, and she’s in Beijing and doing OK,” Simon said. “We haven’t spoken directly with her.”If the stalemate continues, Simon said the tour would seek a longer-term solution for the Finals, which have traditionally been a key revenue stream. Instead, the WTA was obliged to provide the $5 million in prize money in Guadalajara and again in Fort Worth: quite a downturn from Shenzhen providing it all in 2019.“It’s just pretty sad the WTA kind of got hit by Covid and by not having the place to play before and organize everything properly,” No. 1 Iga Swiatek said.Katelyn Mulcahy/Getty ImagesSimon said there was more interest from prospective cities in staging the event on a multiyear basis because of the economics. He said securing sites for a single year has been a challenge despite going to market in March this year. Though Fort Worth and its modern arena were welcome, announcing it so late in the season made it difficult to promote (as did football season in Texas).“We’re not going to continue to do these one-year decisions,” Simon said. “It’s not sustainable. If it looks like we can’t go back to China or aren’t ready to go back, then I do think we will carve out a multiyear situation, because we need to for the business.”The WTA signed a new title sponsor, Hologic, in 2022 that provided crucial funding, some of it up front, but the tour continues to seek other investors and is now in exclusive and advanced negotiations with CVC Capital Partners, a private equity firm based in Luxembourg that could take a stake in the tour and help address the prize-money gap that Swiatek complained about.“It’s just a very complex business decision and business move we need to work through,” said Simon, emphasizing that the deal, if concluded, would not further complicate the governance of a sport already awash in governing bodies.Though the four Grand Slam tournaments and several other top-tier combined events, like the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., offer equal prize money to men and women, the gap has widened between many stand-alone men’s and women’s events.“When are people going to start stepping up and actually following through?” Simon said. “They are saying one thing about support of women athletes and sports and leagues and the need to invest, but when it comes to actually stepping up and treating it the same way and investing that isn’t happening.”Though a merger with the ATP, an idea floated most recently during tennis’ hiatus in 2020 at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, has not materialized, there is increased cooperation, symbolized by the United Cup, the new men’s and women’s team event in Australia in January that was formerly the men’s only ATP Cup and will lead in to the Australian Open.But major equity issues remain, including the persistent dearth of women in coaching. The WTA said that there are only six working full time with the top 100 WTA singles players and top 50 doubles players. The issue is complex. Women have traditionally been more resistant to the year-round travel, and male coaches often still serve as hitting partners for female pros, thus fulfilling two roles and saving money. But Simon sees bias as well, and the WTA launched an initiative last week to increase those paltry numbers, offering an online certification course and opportunities to shadow coaches and players during tournaments.“I think you’re dealing again with one of those stigmas,” Simon said. “Hopefully we can recruit and get more women after they finish playing or they’ve gone through the coaching ranks that they will continue to rise and become a part of the tour.”Simon said the WTA will also soon appoint a new director of safeguarding: a topic at the forefront of women’s sports with last month’s investigative report on the National Women’s Soccer League revealing widespread sexual misconduct and coercion by coaches.In tennis, Pierre Bouteyre, a former coach of the leading French tennis player Fiona Ferro, was charged earlier this year in France with rape and sexual assault against Ferro when she was a teenager.“It’s a critical issue to the tour, and it goes way beyond sport,” Simon said of protecting players from abuse.The WTA has existing programs focused on player education and background checks and credentialing for coaches. But Simon and other tennis leaders believe the sport should do much more collectively. He said the International Tennis Integrity Agency, the independent body that investigates doping and corruption in the game, could add safeguarding to its portfolio.“It’s exploratory for now but serious,” said Simon, who said involving the agency would allow coordinated oversight across the “entire sport” from the junior level to the pro tour.“That’s not the case now, everyone is doing their own thing to the best they can,” Simon said. “One of the education pieces is we need to help ourselves. If you see it, you need to report it, so we can react to it versus just dealing with rumors, because it’s such a sensitive topic, and it’s hard to get people to come forward.” More

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      WTA Finals Set for Texas This Year, but a Return to China Is Uncertain

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      The year-end event is due to return to China in 2023, but the tour said its suspension of tournaments there after Peng Shuai accused a former government official of sexual assault remained in place.The WTA announced Tuesday that Fort Worth would host its annual season-ending WTA Finals this year.The tournament, which will begin Oct. 31, said it had a one-year agreement to play in Fort Worth, “with the event thereafter due to return to Shenzhen, China.” But the WTA said the suspension of its tournaments in China remained in place, leaving the WTA Finals’ return to China in 2023 uncertain.WTA tournaments in China have been suspended since December, when Steve Simon, the tour’s chairman and chief executive, announced the decision, after the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai shared in a post online an allegation of sexual assault against a former top Chinese government official.In the following weeks, Peng, 36, was not seen publicly, and it was unclear whether she was safe or able to speak freely without interference from the Chinese government. She later deleted her post.In November, the editor of a state-run newspaper shared clips said to be of the Chinese tennis star on Twitter. But they were unverified, and Simon called them “insufficient.” The WTA had called for Chinese authorities to investigate the accusation and end censorship on the subject before suspending tournaments.After Peng went public with her allegations, tennis fans were spotted at tournaments, including this year’s Australian Open, with signs and T-shirts reading “Where is Peng Shuai?” Others, including Serena Williams, took to social media to express concerns about Peng’s safety.“If powerful people can suppress the voices of women and sweep allegations of sexual assault under the rug, then the basis on which the WTA was founded — equality for women — would suffer an immense setback,” Simon said in a statement in December, announcing an effective boycott of tennis in China. “I will not and cannot let that happen to the WTA and its players.”In February, around the time Peng met with the International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach at the Beijing Games, Simon called for a chance to have a private meeting with Peng, adding in a statement that “we continue to hold firm on our position and our thoughts remain with Peng Shuai.”In an email on Tuesday, a WTA spokeswoman said that the organization “continues to work towards a resolution in China and are hopeful we will be in a position to operate events in the region in 2023 and beyond but will not compromise our founding principles in order to do so.”The WTA’s stance has not come without a cost. China had been a fundamental source of financial stability for the WTA, with 10 events that accounted for about one-third of the tour’s annual revenue in 2019. The most profitable and recognized of those events was the WTA Finals, which offered record prize money of $14 million in 2019.The WTA gained some relief from that loss of revenue in March, when, after more than a decade without a title sponsor, it agreed to a multiyear deal with Hologic, a leading global medical device and diagnostics company focused on women’s health.The WTA Finals have been roaming the world for a home since 2019, which was the first year of what was supposed to be a 10-year deal that would have kept the tournament in Shenzhen, a city of more than 17 million.But the following year, the WTA Finals were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, and in 2021, the tournament scrambled at the last minute to find a host and ended up in Guadalajara, Mexico, where Garbiñe Muguruza of Spain won the final against Anett Kontaveit of Estonia.Having the tournament in Texas this year brings the WTA Finals, which has had different names over the years, back to the United States for the first time since 2005, and it adds to the tour’s presence in the United States to end the year. After the U.S. Open, the WTA will have a 500-level tournament in San Diego in October and a 125-level tournament in Midland, Mich., about 130 miles northwest of Detroit.The tournament in Fort Worth, about 30 miles west of Dallas, will be played at Dickies Arena, a 14,000-seat multipurpose venue that opened in 2019. The venue has hosted a rodeo, concerts, the U.S. Gymnastics Championships, and the first and second rounds of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament. More

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      Wu Yibing’s US Open Run Could Influence Tennis in China

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      Wu Yibing became the first Chinese man to reach the third round of a Grand Slam since 1946. He says it’s his “responsibility” to pick up where the retired champion Li Na left off in growing the game.Follow live as Serena Williams plays Ajla Tomljanovic at the U.S. Open.Shortly after Wu Yibing made tennis history on Wednesday by becoming the first Chinese man to reach the third round of the U.S. Open, a tournament that dates to 1881, he was informed that his name was on fire on Chinese social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat.Fans and admirers in China were spreading the word that Wu, a past U.S. Open junior champion, had just beaten Nuno Borges of Portugal in a tough five-set match that lasted nearly four hours. Not only was Wu the first Chinese man to advance into the third round at the U.S. Open, he became the first to reach the third round of a Grand Slam event since Kho Sin-Khie, an Indonesian-born player who competed under the Chinese flag, did it at Wimbledon in 1946.As a groundbreaking player with aspirations to elevate men’s tennis in China, just as the retired two-time major champion Li Na did for Chinese women, Wu, 22, was asked what that kind of social media attention back home meant to him.“That I’m a good-looking guy,” he quipped, eliciting uproarious laughter from reporters at a late-night news conference.That may be true, but Wu has other talents that could help make him one of the most influential players in the game. Primarily, he is very good at tennis, with a complete arsenal of shots and the court savvy to squeeze the best out of his ability. And his answer to that question illustrated he has an engaging personality that could also help draw others into his orbit.Serena Williams at the U.S. OpenThe U.S. Open was very likely the tennis star’s last professional tournament after a long career of breaking boundaries and obliterating expectations.Glorious Goodbye: Even as Serena Williams faced career point, she put on a gutsy display of the power and resilience that have kept fans cheering for nearly 30 years.The Magic Ends: Zoom into this composite photo to see details of Williams’s final moment on Ashe Stadium at this U.S. Open.Her Fans: We asked readers to share their memories of watching Williams play and the emotions that she stirred. There was no shortage of submissions.Sisterhood on the Court: Since Williams and her sister Venus burst onto the tennis scene in the 1990s, their legacies have been tied to each other’s.“He is very outgoing and loves to joke around,” said Gerardo Azcurra, his coach. “He is not afraid to talk.”Wu, playing a shot in Monday’s first round at the U.S. Open, trained at the I.M.G. Academy in Florida.Sarah Stier/Getty ImagesBut as much as Wu enjoys kidding around, he also understands his place in the game. He knows he is in a position to influence the way an entire sport is perceived by millions of people in China, and how fast it can grow. Along with his friends Zhang Zhizhen, 25, and the 17-year-old rising star Shang Juncheng, he is part of the core of China’s emerging men’s tennis hopes to not only to play well on tour, but to develop the game back home.“I have the responsibility to do it, and with my ability, it will always be part of my career,” Wu said. “I think it can really help kids to love tennis, to pay attention to the sport. Before Li Na, we did not have many tennis facilities in China. But then it got more popular and hopefully I can bring even more tennis to China.”Wu began playing as a young boy in Hangzhou, China. His father, Wu Kang, was an amateur boxer and felt his son needed to get more physically fit. Wu initially tried badminton, but the net was too high and he could not get the shuttlecock over it. So, he settled on tennis, where the nets are lower and the aspirations higher.Within a few years, Wu was winning local tournaments and then regional ones. By the time he was 16, he was competing internationally.He first drew the attention of broad swathes of Chinese tennis fans when he won the U.S. Open junior tournament in 2017, in both singles and doubles. It was a breakthrough that earned him an invitation to train at the I.M.G. Academy in Bradenton, Fla., to work on his game and learn English — which he did extremely well. It was also where he first met Azcurra.Azcurra left I.M.G. three years ago to coach privately, and Wu asked in January if they could reunite. Wu moved into Azcurra’s house in Bradenton and they have formed a productive relationship, with Wu winning four lower-level tournaments this year.“He has had some little injuries, some illness,” Azcurra said, “but every time he comes back stronger. He injured his ankle, came back and won a Futures tournament. He got sick, but came back and won a Challenger.”Wu, Zhang Zhizhen, pictured, and the 17-year-old rising star Shang Juncheng are part of the core of China’s emerging men’s tennis hopes.Geoff Burke/USA Today Sports, via ReutersOn Friday, the stakes will grow exponentially when Wu plays Daniil Medvedev of Russia, the No. 1 seed and defending champion, in Arthur Ashe Stadium. It will be the biggest match that Wu, ranked No. 174, has ever played. In a dizzying few months with Azcurra, he has gone from the outskirts of the tennis tour to its largest stadium.In April, Wu was ranked 1,738th and playing in Orange Park, Fla. In July he was playing a Challenger event (a minor league tournament) in Rome, Ga. But he did well enough to earn a chance to qualify for the U.S. Open, which he did, and now he will face the top player in the world under the lights in Ashe.Wu shrugged when asked how daunting the challenge will be against Medvedev.“All tennis players watch his matches, we know how good he is,” Wu said during an interview Thursday afternoon. “I respect him, but when we are on the court, we are opponents competing against each other. None of the rankings matter. I want to show that I’m not scared or whatever. It’s just a match.”Presumably, many people in China will be paying attention to how Wu fares, both on the court and on social media. He has a Weibo account, but Li Xi, his agent, jokes that he has only about 150,000 followers, a relatively small number in a country as populous as China.“You need to post more,” she said with a laugh.“That’s not my job,” he responded.His job is to play tennis, win matches and give the occasional interview. So, when a reporter asked if there was anything else he would like to add, Wu smiled.“That’s enough,” he said. “I’ve already given you a lot of information.” More

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      Chinese Tennis Star, Zheng Qinwen, Emerges During French Open

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      Zheng Qinwen, 19, has emerged during this French Open, amid the backdrop of a long standoff between China and the women’s tour over Peng Shuai.PARIS — To keep things simpler for her Mandarin-challenged Western friends, the rising Chinese tennis star Zheng Qinwen often goes by the nickname Ana.But if you watch the teenage Zheng hit a forehand, a serve or just about any shot on a tennis court, her first English-language nickname seems more appropriate.“At the real beginning at IMG, they called me Fire,” she said in an interview at the French Open on Friday, referring to her management company, IMG.There is indeed plenty of power and passion in Zheng’s game, as she demonstrated in her second-round upset of Simona Halep. Ranked No. 74 and climbing, Zheng, a 19-year-old French Open rookie with a lively personality, is one of the most promising young players in the world as she prepares to face Alizé Cornet of France on Saturday on the main Philippe Chatrier Court.But Zheng’s run comes at a particularly uncertain time for an emerging Chinese tennis star. She is one of the leaders of the so-called Li Na generation: the group of young Chinese players who gravitated to the game after the success of Li, China’s first Grand Slam singles champion and long one of the highest-earning female athletes. “Li Na makes me think big,” said Zheng, just 8 years old when Li won the French Open in 2011.Li, who retired in September 2014 at age 32, was one of the catalysts for the WTA Tour’s decision to increase its presence in China, packing its late-season calendar with tournaments in the country including the WTA Finals, the tour’s year-end championships, which moved to Shenzhen, China, in 2019 for 10 years and offered a record $14 million in prize money, including a winner’s check of over $4 million.But despite the long-term deal, there has yet to be another WTA Finals in China and no tour event of any kind since global sporting events were disrupted in early 2020 near the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Though the tour resumed in other parts of the world later that year, China kept its borders shut to most international visitors and international sports events.In December, the WTA Tour suspended all tournaments in China because of allegations made by Peng Shuai, a prominent Chinese player. In an online post, Peng accused Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier of China, of sexual assault. The post was quickly taken down and online conversation about Peng in China was censored.The WTA requested guarantees of her safety, a direct line of communication with her and, most improbably in light of the Chinese context, a full and transparent investigation into the allegations. Peng has since reappeared in public in China and suggested that her online post had been misinterpreted and that she had not made sexual assault allegations. She also has announced her retirement at age 36. But though the issue has largely faded from the headlines, the WTA Tour has not lifted the suspension or backed away from its demands for an investigation. It is still unable to communicate with her directly and concerned that she has been coerced into a retraction.The WTA already has announced that it will not return to China this season, and it is possible even without the WTA suspension that the Chinese government would not have allowed tournaments to go ahead in 2022 considering that numerous major cities, including Shanghai, have been locked down in recent weeks because of new restrictions amid a surge in coronavirus cases.For now — and perhaps quite a bit longer — Zheng and her compatriots are without a Chinese showcase for their talents even though the men’s tour has not suspended its events in China.“Of course, I wish I can play at home,” Zheng said. “I know it is China decision, and I cannot do anything. Let’s see.”The three-year absence of tour-level events in China also means that Zheng and the other Chinese women’s players must remain abroad even more than usual.“I’m sad because if they make a lot of tournaments in China then I have a chance to come back,” she said. Zheng, now based in Barcelona, Spain, and coached by Pere Riba, a former top-100 men’s player, has spent much of her short life away from home. Originally from the central Chinese city of Shiyan, Zheng was encouraged by her parents to choose a sport.“My parents asked me to choose between basketball, badminton and tennis, and I found out my favorite sport is tennis,” said Zheng, who also spent two years playing table tennis before losing interest. “I felt like there was more space to compete. Tennis is a game of choice. It’s not who’s stronger or who’s more powerful or who’s faster. Every decision you make on court can change the match.”She was an only child but said she moved to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province and about 250 miles from Shiyan, when she was just 8. She said she spent four years there.“That was a difficult time for me because I was not with my parents at that moment,” she said. “They came to visit me like once a week or two weeks one time.”She said it was her father’s decision for her to join the tennis program in Wuhan so young. “He saw that I was good at tennis, and he wanted to see if I could do something,” she said.The talent scouts soon agreed. IMG signed her to a contract at age 11, not long after her father convinced her mother to make the long journey to the United States with Zheng in November 2013 to take part in the Nick Bollettieri Discovery Open, an event at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., that was open to young players without an invitation.“My mother didn’t want to go,” Zheng said. “But my father said now she is the best in China at her age so now you have to see where she is in the world.”Her first impression?“The first thought I had in the head was, ‘Wow, the sky is so blue,’” she said. “Because China, you know, had a little bit of pollution at that time.”Once on the court, she brought the thunder. “I happened to be there,” said Marijn Bal, who became one of Zheng’s agent at IMG. “And the coaches were watching all the matches, and they were like, ‘You have to come. There’s this Chinese girl who is amazing.’”Upon returning to China, she eventually relocated to Beijing to train at an academy run by Carlos Rodriguez, the Argentine-Belgian coach who worked with Li at the end of her career and had spent more than a decade coaching Justine Henin, a former No. 1 player.Zheng said she spent 90 minutes a day working with Rodriguez for several years on technique, tactics and her mentality. “I think Carlos made the base for what I am right now,” Zheng said.What she is now, with her power game modeled initially after Serena Williams and Kim Clijsters, is a threat to the establishment. That includes Cornet, a 32-year-old French star in perhaps her final season who will have no shortage of crowd support on Saturday as Zheng makes her debut on center court.“I’m ready for that,” Zheng said calmly. “I like to play on the big stages.”Until further notice, however, the big stages in women’s tennis are all outside of China. More