A dull debate
Newsflash: sport can be boring.
I feel like people might need reminding, as one boring women’s grand slam final sent some into a tizzy about equal pay.
On Saturday Iga Swiatek won €2.4 million, after securing her third consecutive Roland Garros title, and fourth overall. At just 23 years old she is already a five-time major champion.
She won her latest last Saturday, by beating Italy’s Jasmine Paolini - a surprise finalist - 6-2 6-1 in 68 minutes. In total Swiatek spent nine hours and 58 minutes on court over the entire fortnight.
It prompted one podcast channel, Game to Love, to ask on X whether it was fair for her to win the same prize money as men’s champion Carlos Alcaraz, who spent 20 hours and 42 minutes on court in Paris.
“Is this equality?” the podcasters posed to their followers, asking them to take a poll. Of the 11,597 respondents, 53.6 per cent said that they thought it was “equality”.
Good to see common sense prevail (just), but it is a yawn-inducing conversation, prompted by a podcast channel looking for clicks, traction and vying for relevance.
An obvious point now: women do not spend as much time playing grand slam matches because the rules block them from doing so. Men play best-of-five sets at slams, women play best-of-three.
This is not because women opted out of the longer format, by the way, but it was a rule imposed on them in the early 1900s because it was believed they were more physically limited than men.
It has mostly endured over the century or so since, apart from a few WTA Finals matches played between 1984 and 1998. Some players, including champions like Martina Navratilova, Amelie Mauresmo and Serena Williams, have been in favour of moving to best-of-five for women, other players are less inclined to change things.
The challenges of a best-of-five-set match are different to three, but not necessarily more difficult. It depends on how you look at things. Five sets can push players to their physical limits, showing a level of endurance that few sports replicate, but three sets require very intense focus under pressure. Women need to be more consistent during their matches, cannot have too many dips, as the shorter format does not leave room for error - two sets can easily run away from you and you’re dumped out of the biggest tournament of the year.
My personal view is that it would be fun for men and women to play best-of-three sets up to the fourth round of majors, and then both could switch to best-of-five from the quarterfinals onwards. It would solve congested scheduling issues during the early rounds and create new narratives for later stages in the tournament.
But I don’t think the changes should happen simply to appease those who deride equal pay as a concept. Nor is it the type of debate keeping any tennis player up at night. Maybe because there are far more important things they would love to change ahead of these formatting questions, or maybe because it is such a dumb argument to suggest that tennis players should be valued based on an hourly rate.
The idea that time spent on court should be the determining factor in deciding pay is bizarre. If we were looking at things that way, men’s runner-up Alexander Zverev should have taken home the biggest cheque from Paris, for spending close to 24 hours on court in the tournament, making the longest route to the French Open final since records began in 1991. But he lost, and Alcaraz won.
How would paying players by the hour work, and where would it end? Would it be half a million euros for every set played, plus a cheeky €100,000 bonus every time you push a set to a tiebreak? Or are we talking a running total literally based on the minutes spent on court? Forget the serve clocks, every player would have excruciatingly precise, lengthy routines like Rafael Nadal’s or Novak Djokovic’s, complete with 20 bounces of the ball before serving.
The whole argument is ludicrous. If players are deemed more valuable because they spend more time getting into five-set marathons, then (surprise, surprise) we are automatically putting women at a disadvantage by not opening the format up to them.
Among the silly debates, there is a serious issue here: how broadcasters see things. They buy the rights to these tournaments, and may well see the value in longer matches as it allows for more advertising spots and time on screen. That can have real impact. Amazon Prime Video did not comment when asked by multiple media outlets last week about their broadcast deal with the French Open, but (as mentioned in my last post), Ons Jabeur wondered if the broadcaster’s preferences might have contributed to the decision to omit women from the primetime night sessions.
Time spent on court is not a guarantee of better entertainment though, as most would agree that Naomi Osaka’s three-set battle in the second round versus Swiatek was the best match of the tournament in Paris.
Regardless, longer matches should not be what the sport is aiming for. Average match times have been creeping up over the past few decades and it is a problem, as the way audiences consume sport has trended in the opposite direction. Attention spans are shorter than they were before the social media age, so a marathon sport does not have the same appeal for all viewers.
While those in stadiums will value getting more tennis for their ticket price, many sat at home will feel bogged down by the undulating peaks and troughs of a five-hour match - no matter how brilliant the highlights reel makes it look.
Applying the mindset that the longer a sport goes on, the better it is, makes no sense. In athletics, 100m sprinters are the superstars, lauded for their ability to master a race which barely takes 10 seconds. Golf is valued on efficiency: the fewest shots taken across a course. Flawlessness is required to gain the better scores in gymnastics too.
No one is saying tennis should aim for one-sided, short matches, but the sport seems to have swung too far the other way. It seems to have an obsession with quantity over quality, and it means some of the best performances overlooked.
Why don’t we flip the debate. Iga Swiatek won 93 per cent of her sets, Carlos Alcaraz won only 80 per cent, and both still earned the same money for winning the tournament. Is that equality?
Swiatek was relentlessly brilliant during the fortnight, unplayable at times and completely efficient. Her win-loss record in Paris is 35-2. That’s 95 per cent. Swiatek on clay, especially in Paris, is the toughest task in tennis right now.
But some would like to punish her for that, question her excellence because she did not make it a competitive contest. Was she meant to throw the second set against Paolini, just to make it more interesting for us?
This familiar, tired debate is one that existed when Serena Williams was dominating tennis. The last time a woman won the same slam three times in a row like Swiatek, was more than a decade ago when Williams cleaned up at the US Open from 2012-14.
Like Swiatek now, peak Williams would dispatch with opponents ruthlessly, in an almost clinical fashion. Very few stood a chance. Now Williams’s 23 grand slam titles are lauded, but when she was collecting them she probably wasn’t appreciated in the same way. She, like Swiatek, prompted questions like, is it good for women’s tennis that one person keeps winning?
Women’s tennis is full of great storylines and interesting rivalries at the top right now. Swiatek is the best on clay, but she is regularly bettered by the likes of Elena Rybakina and Aryna Sabalenka on other surfaces. Coco Gauff may struggle against Swiatek, but she is consistently pushing other top players, and Osaka’s re-emergence is adding even more intrigue to the women’s game. The sport is in a healthy space, but the narrative around Swiatek’s win in Paris from some corners would suggest it isn’t.
When women’s tennis was too unpredictable, people said the quality was too low, the players too inconsistent, the product not interesting enough. But now that Swiatek is proving unbeatable on the Paris clay, there are questions about how fair her winner’s check is. Go figure.
Former player Andrea Petkovic, wrote about this expertly in her excellent Substack post earlier week. “A thing that has not only made me unhappy but straight-up furious is the blatant misogyny that Iga Swiatek is facing for BEING TOO GOOD AT HER JOB,” she wrote. “I never heard anybody complain when nearly forty-year-old Novak Djokovic beats young talents on one leg because he’s that good.”
I similarly do not remember any of this talk when Nadal was notching up 14 titles at Roland Garros. Four of his last five finals were straight-set marches to the trophy, not classic matches by any stretch, but his remarkable achievement was quite rightly the focus.
Luckily the legends can appreciate greatness in real time. Chris Evert, who holds the women’s record at Roland Garros with seven titles, is sure that Swiatek will surpass her. “I don’t just think she will beat my record here – I think it’s double digits,” she said on Eurosport.
Justine Henin, the last woman to win three Roland Garros titles in a row - her final title coming in 2007 - was also in awe. “Iga is the boss,” Henin told wtatennis.com. “We can see how hard it is to win and to win and to win. It’s tough to stay at the top of the game for such a long time. Iga, she has something special for this.”
Incidentally, this year’s final was the most lopsided since 2007 and, in going 5-0 in her first five major finals, Swiatek follows Monica Seles as the only other woman to do so in the Open era.
The stats and records Swiatek is chasing (and even matching) put her in the conversation among some of these greats already. It is easy to forget that she is still only 23, and hopefully has many more years at this level ahead of her. It would be nice to appreciate her talents while she is actually playing, rather than simply look back in a decade and only then marvelling at what she achieved.
Sport does not always deliver the competitive contest we hope for. Not every final will be a classic, not every rivalry will live up to the hype every single time they play. In men’s sport that is taken as an accepted part of things, but in women’s sport a few dud matches can lead to thought pieces on whether matches were a “good advert for the game”.
There is room for that if a sport is in crisis. But with stars like Swiatek, Gauff, Sabalenka and Osaka involved, I don’t think women’s tennis is there. So let’s drop the existential questions this time, allow a match be lacklustre, and move on.
Recommendations
Last weekend Thornaby FC made national headlines in the UK when its committee voted to axe its entire female section - leaving more than 100 women and girls without a club. It was heartening to see the women’s sport community join forces to highlight the issue and blast the committee for the outrageous decision - with players including Lioness Beth Mead sharing the story.
Since then, several of the football club directors have stepped down and a new committee is developing a strategy to support the whole club moving forward.
One of the young girls affected, Lily, gave an interview to the BBC which went viral. “If girls want to play football, you can’t just not let them,” she said. It was a simple, earnest statement from a child that brought home just how ridiculous the decision had been.
FOUDYS, along with the Women's Sports Collective, Jill Scott, Mead and more, have come together to produce the Thornaby FC Support Tee - with Lily’s words emblazoned across the front.
T-shirts cost from £12.50 (child and adult sizes) and are available from foudys.com right now - all profits going to support the female players from Thornaby FC. Buy it here.
As ever, let me know what you think in the comments!
Until next time,
Molly x
P.S. - sorry this post is a couple of days late - normal service will resume next week with my post coming on Wednesday!