Stalking: Women's sport's grim underbelly

On Emma Raducanu's scare in Dubai

I don’t know if I’ve seen a more upsetting scene on the field of play than Emma Raducanu stifling back tears and cowering behind the umpire’s chair. Not for a long time at least.

Raducanu was just minutes into her second round match in Dubai, when she spotted a man in the first few rows of the crowd who had accosted her the previous day. His presence was enough to cause her to pause, alert the umpire, and promptly break down in tears. When her opponent Karolina Muchova realised what was happening, she went over to comfort Raducanu briefly, while umpire Miriam Bley called for assistance.

We know now, courtesy of a WTA statement, that the same man had approached Raducanu on Monday. Here’s the statement in full:

“On Monday, February 17, Emma Raducanu was approached in a public area by a man who exhibited fixated behavior. This same individual was identified in the first few rows during Emma’s match on Tuesday at the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships and subsequently ejected. He will be banned from all WTA events pending a threat assessment.

“Player safety is our top priority, and tournaments are advised on security best practices for international sporting events. The WTA is actively working with Emma and her team to ensure her well-being and provide any necessary support. We remain committed to collaborating with tournaments and their security teams worldwide to maintain a safe environment for all players.”

Remarkably, once the man was removed, Raducanu was able to rally back from 0-4 in the first set to make the match competitive, but ultimately lost 7-6 6-4 to Muchova. It is a testament to the 22-year-old’s composure that she even got through the match at all. I suspect most people, like me, would have been making a swift exit from the entire venue, let alone continuing to compete on court.

Raducanu has since posted on social media: “Thank you everyone for the messages of support. Difficult experience yesterday but I’ll be okay and proud of how I came back and competed despite what happened at the start of the match. Thank you to Karolina for being a great sport and best of luck for the rest of the tournament.”

Unfortunately, it’s an awful situation that she and far too many female athletes go through. Stalking and harassment are not uncommon experiences. Just to be clear, I’m defining stalking as per the crime survey for England and Wales (as per the Office for National Statistics website): two or more incidents causing distress, fear, or alarm, including:

• receiving obscene or threatening unwanted letters, emails, text messages or phone calls

• having obscene or threatening information about them placed on the internet

• a person waiting or loitering around their home or workplace

• being followed or watched

Go back to 1993, and an obsessive Steffi Graf ‘fan’ attacked and stabbed her rival Monic Seles on court in Hamburg. In 2012, a man was arrested for trying to break into the Wimbledon grounds to get close to Serena Williams. Raducanu has been through this (at least) one previous time too. In 2022 a man was given a five-year restraining order, after showing up at Raducanu’s family home three times, including walking 23 miles to get there, and was deranged enough to steal her father’s shoe as a souvenir. The court heard that Raducanu was "constantly looking over her shoulder" and no longer felt "safe in her own home" as a result of his harassment.

Last month, a 55-year-old man was charged with stalking Caitlin Clark, for allegedly sending messages of a sexually violent nature to her as well as saying he had driven to her home three times. In December, Katie Boulter told me in an interview for the Guardian that she was once followed by a car all the way from Queen’s Club to Sloane Square (a 20 minute drive). She also had a fan at the Nottingham Open threaten her safety, and say he was “outside” the player area and was “going to hurt her”. The WTA found and removed this man from the site. In another interview, American player Danielle Collins shared with me that stalkers had been an issue throughout her career, with one instance of her friends and family being called up at their place of work by a person harassing her during her earlier professional years.

Speaking with both Collins and Boulter, I remember being struck by how matter-of-fact they were recounting these creepy and downright frightening stories. I’ve reported on women’s sport for years, including abuse cases, but I was still alarmed by how commonplace and experience this appeared to be. When I told them how horrific it sounded, they were almost surprised by how naively shocked I was. “I don’t think it’s something that gets talked about a ton, but many of us have had security issues during our time playing on tour,” Collins said.

All of this is to say that Raducanu is not alone and this type of terrifying harassment affects players of varying levels of prominence or profile. The difference is that, for Raducanu on Tuesday, this actually played out on the court, so we all got to see it happen live. Most instances of stalking are dealt with quietly, behind the scenes, while athletes put on brave faces and continue to perform to their highest level despite knowing they are walking targets.

In some ways, tennis players are more exposed than in many other sports. In football or rugby say, a player will only be visible to fans when on the pitch, on the bench or when they’re getting on and off the team bus. In all of those cases, fans are almost always penned behind a barrier of some kind. In tennis though, the fans are often closer to the players. The court side seats can sometimes be within touching distance, fan interactions at matches are commonplace, and at some events players will walk among the punters to get to their assigned courts (almost always with security personnel in tow). That is part of the charm and appeal of the sport in my opinion. As a fan you can really feel like you’re in and amongst the action, as players and venues feel more accessible and you can roam a bit more freely from court to court.

But it clearly comes with risks. Collins described feeling panicked in those thronged, busy environments at tennis tournaments, because of the threats she’s experienced, and I’ve heard similar from other women in the sport.

Coming back to Raducanu, I reported at the Dubai tennis (ATP event) in 2022 at the same venue she was playing last night. As a journalist, it was a supremely convenient tournament to report at. The official tournament hotel (the Jumeirah Creekside Hotel) literally backs onto the venue grounds and is advertised on the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships website too. The area around the main stadium is bustling with fans and the general public alike, in a busy collection of bars known as the Irish Village. I stayed at the tournament hotel, like many of the players did, and I could roll out of bed and make the three-minute walk to the tennis courts to report at the tournament. It’s a brilliant perk (compared to events where players have to commute further distances from their hotel to the tournament venue). But it also means any so-called fan might think that, if they hover close by the hotel lobby or grounds for long enough, they could catch a glimpse of their favourite player. There has been no information shared on where Raducanu was confronted by this “fixated” man on Monday, except that it was in a public space. But I’d say Dubai is one of the tournaments with the most open and accessible feel of any I’ve been to. I think this is an amazing part of the fan-going experience, but people with bad intentions can also, unfortunately, see opportunity in that.

It is worth mentioning that the WTA doled out a lifetime ban to the fan in this incident with Raducanu. Speaking with Collins and Boulter last year, they were also full of praise for the WTA’s protocols and the way the organisation dealt with their individual harassment issues. Over the past few years, the WTA has expanded its dedicated staff in safeguarding (including by introducing a director of safeguarding), added an education module for anyone seeking credentials for restricted areas, and also added a Safeguarding Code of Conduct, which “ensures that all WTA Tour participants have a shared responsibility for keeping one another safe from abuse”. More to that, they’ve tried to tackle online abuse head on, with a monitoring system to keep track of abuse and threats sent to players introduced last year. There’s also mental health professionals on site or available over the phone at every WTA event, to help support players.

This is far from just a tennis issue — this kind of incident doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Writing about the #MeToo movement in sport nearly four years ago, I interviewed women who dealt with incessant online harassment. Women athletes receive more of this than men. For example, a report last October by the NCAA, which governs US college sports, found that women’s basketball players received three times more online threats than male players. Also, one in five players at the 2023 Women’s World Cup were the targets of online abuse, with homophobic, sexist and sexualised messages accounting for more than 50 per cent of the abusive messages received. That can manifest itself ‘offline’ too, as experienced by Manchester City striker Khadija ‘Bunny’ Shaw, who withdrew from the club’s League Cup semi-final earlier this month on account of racist abuse she received.

Sport is ultimately a reflection of wider society. Women experience threats and violence throughout everyday life. The Office for National Statistics found women are more likely to be a victim of stalking — as is the case for many other violent crimes. One in five women have experienced stalking at some point since the age of 16, according to latest figures.

As a colleague put it to me in a message this morning: “On top of earning less, being weighed down by impossible expectations (you can’t win, remember?), and having to be a positive role model for the advancement of women’s sport, women athletes also have to deal with male violence. For f***’* sake.”

She summed up a sorry picture, and Raducanu’s panicked tears in Dubai serve as a reminder of the scummy underbelly beneath the glitzy rise of women’s sport.

Recommendations

The tennis news has been bleak this week, so brace yourselves. More important reporting from Charlie Eccleshare and Matt Futterman of the Athletic, detailing Stefano Vukov’s treatment of former Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina. Some of it is sordid, but necessary reading.

Then there’s Jannik Sinner’s three-month ban from tennis, which comes after he agreed to a settlement with WADA. It means he avoids going to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, where WADA were seeking a ban of up to two years, and he will return before the next Grand Slam event in Paris. All very convenient timing, and sparked a lot of pushback from fellow players (including two-time major champion Stan Wawrinka). I listened to The Tennis Podcast, Andy Roddick’s Served podcast and Tennis Unfiltered to hear some different perspectives across the sport.

Speaking of podcasts, Chris Hoy’s and Matt Majendie’s Sporting Misadventures podcast had Andy Murray on the show last week and it was jokes. Listen to it if only for his anecdote about a doping test going epically wrong in a loo cubicle.

Elsewhere, in case you missed it, Donald Trump’s administration is doing absolutely nothing to protect women’s sport — don’t let them tell you otherwise. This news is proof — they have rescinded guidance related to Title IX, that stated that revenue-sharing payments from colleges to student athletes must be "proportionately" distributed to men and women athletes. I despair.

Thanks for reading,

Molly x