At Roland Garros,
Big sensation this Saturday morning at Roland-Garros. When she was supposed to face Spaniard Sara Sorribes Tormo at 11 a.m. on Central Court, the number 4 seed and one of the favorites to win the tournament, Elena Rybakina, had to forfeit at the last minute. But that’s not the craziest part of this story. In the wake of this announcement, the Kazak was indeed announced in the press room to explain the reasons for this abandonment.
Result: “I didn’t feel well yesterday, I had a high fever, headaches and I didn’t sleep. Today it is the same. I’m far from 100%. It’s bad luck for me,” she said in the small No. 2 press room filled to the brim with reporters. The problem is that if it’s actually bad luck for her, it’s not bad either for the dozens of colleagues crowded into the room facing a player who is visibly very sick but… not wearing a mask. !
At the end of this conf ‘express, some wonder. “But why didn’t you schedule it in the big press conference room?” “, is surprised a colleague. “And above all, why didn’t she have a mask? another chokes. Posted in front of our screen to follow the conf ‘from a distance, we then saw a tournament employee arrive with a mini-wipe, obviously not knowing what to do with it.
Relative disinfection
After a quick knock on the microphone reserved for journalists – a microphone that Rybakina therefore did not touch – he began to fiddle with the tournament sponsors’ water bottles positioned on the athletes’ desk, without anyone really understand the purpose of the maneuver. This one will even go so far as to turn the bottle of Vittel upside down to make it fit on the cork. NO BUT WHAT’S THE FUCK MAN ??? The cleaner will still end up briefly cleaning the chair on which Rybakina sat before passing a blow on the microphone used by the Kazak, but without cleaning the windshield…
If the scene caused a lot of laughter in the press room, we can still be surprised that a player coming to announce that she had been sick all night tumbles into a conference without the slightest facial protection, all in a room no bigger than a student studio under the roofs of Paris. It’s not like the world has been quarantined for weeks because of a hyper-contagious virus. Nor is it as if sporting events were totally safe from germs, as we could see again recently during the last Tour of Italy.