Richard Gasquet gave a tasty interview to the newspaper L’Equipe in which he scratched the governing bodies of tennis and the evolution of the game. In particular ATP.
UTS gave it wings. Richard Gasquet has freed himself over the years from the costume of “little Mozart” of French tennis which hampered him. The Biterrois has appeared in recent weeks in a new light, evoking with disconcerting frankness the governance crisis of world tennis, very glaring during the coronavirus pandemic.
Semi-finalist of the first edition of UTS, a new competition format imagined by Patrick Mouratoglou, Richard Gasquet calls for lessons to be drawn from this new experience to refresh a sport “too sanitized”, frozen in its conservatism, not enough in phase with the times.
Gasquet pleads for “less pretense”
“There is a happy medium to be found. On ATP, you can do nothing, you open your mouth a little, you say shit, it’s 3,000 dollars of fine. The coach whispers something, we line you up direct. It’s unbearable! ” the team on a daily basis the French tennis player, as if freed from a weight.
“There must be more freedom, he continued. Less pretense. More spectacle. To be able to talk to the coach. To hear what your opponent says, it can be not bad.” The French also leans for a shortened playing format.
Gasquet: “ATP? They are quite simply outdated”
“I don’t know if there is anyone who likes tennis more than me, but I can’t watch Roland Garros anymore, I can’t watch four or five sets, even for a Federer-Nadal, admits- he. When you’ve been watching for 1h20, it’s been 7-6, and 0-1 with the guy getting broken at the start of the second, I’m done. It’s tiring. I’m not telling you that ‘you should only do extreme formats, but maybe there is something to be found. “
So much for the format of the matches, but the competition has not yet officially resumed. And may not resume as planned in the United States on August 14, as the country sinks into a very serious health crisis. The uncertainty is complete.
“At ATP, they are catastrophic, they say nothing to the players. They are simply overwhelmed,” said Gasquet, who did not expect much from the directives announced in the matter. A decision is however expected at the end of July.
“The Zoom conferences to say nothing, I do not attend, breathes Gasquet. Anyway, it is the authorities who decide. In New York, it will be the governor. And the government in France for Roland Garros. Neither Bernard Giudicelli (the president of the French Federation), nor the president of the USTA (the United States Tennis Federation) are decision makers. The Federations are puppets! “
