Australian Open boss Craig Tiley has slammed options the season-opening grand slam must be moved from its conventional January timeslot because of the excessive warmth.
January is the most well liked month of the 12 months in Melbourne and whereas the common excessive temperature is 26 levels Celsius, usually pushes into the 30s and better.
It led to The Australian’s Julian Linden writing an opinion piece calling for the event to be moved to February or October to ease the burden on gamers.
However, the Tennis Australia and Australian Open boss shut down the concept.
“I did read that (News Corp report), I thought it was absolutely ridiculous, a bizarre claim,” Tiley mentioned.
“You talk to every player, this is the season. It starts in January. It starts here in Australia.
“It finishes with Davis Cup late on the men’s side and not as late on the women’s side but I do think it’s a long season. We’ve been talking about that for a long time.
“But Australia is the summer, Australia is January and this event is — from the players’ perspective — one of their favourite places to play.
“They’re coming here earlier, we’re now seeing players here for six weeks, for seven weeks and the preparation for the Australian summer is very normalised. They know what they need to do.”
However, each season gamers wrestle with the acute warmth on the event.
Even in 2022, Rafael Nadal defeated Dennis Shapovalov in five-sets over 4 hours, later revealing he had final 4kg and suffered warmth stroke.
The temperatures on the time have been 30 levels in Melbourne however on-court the situations have been sweltering.
In 2018, it was 69 levels on Rod Laver Arena after the temperatures in Melbourne hit 40C.
The BOM has Monday and Tuesday, the opening two days of the Australian Open for the 12 months, at 30C though it is going to be partly cloudy and an opportunity of a bathe on each days, though Saturday is forecast to hit 38C.
Linden argued: “Holding the tournament in the hottest part of the Australian summer is simply ludicrous and cannot be allowed to continue.
“It ranks alongside running the Melbourne Cup on a Tuesday afternoon as the dumbest scheduling decisions in all Australian sports.
“It was already a silly idea when it was first proposed in the mid 1980s but has aged so badly it now looks almost inhumane.”
He argued Covid had opened a uncommon alternative to vary the established order within the sport because the French Open’s conventional May-June timeslot was shifted to September and October in 2020, whereas the Australian Open moved into February.
In 2020, a report from the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub known as for the occasion to be moved to a cooler month.
The size of the season has been one other problem and Alex de Minaur backed the January begin to the season to proceed, regardless of the gruelling size of the calendar, which stretches into the ATP and WTA Finals in November.
“You play tournaments throughout the whole year, you finish quite late. That depends on your schedule and everything,” de Minaur mentioned.
“If there was a bit more time for an off-season, I’m sure a lot of players would like that. But at the same time we’re kind of used to it.
“I’ve done it for a couple years where you finish quite late and then you get right into the midst of things.
“There’s times along the year where you can choose to take a little bit of time off and that’s probably the smartest thing to do. So I’ll be looking at that.”
