Belarusian Victoria Azarenka has blamed ‘quite drunk’ Wimbledon spectators for mistakenly booing her off court following her defeat to Ukraine’s Elina Svitolina on Sunday.
The two tennis stars were involved in an epic tussle on No.1 court with Svitolina coming through 2-6 6-4 7-6 (11-9) to reach the quarter-finals less than a year after giving birth.
But while the 28-year-old was celebrating, Azarenka gave only a cursory gesture towards her opponent with her racket before walking to her seat, packing up her bag and promptly exiting the court without the customary handshake at the net.
Svitolina has not shaken hands with Russian or Belarusian players since the war in Ukraine started and Azarenka, conscious of that fact, decided to avoid an awkward situation.
But the Wimbledon crowd appeared unaware of the tense dynamic between the players and wrongly felt Azarenka had been a sore loser, booing her as she exited the court.
The former world No.1 looked stunned and furious with the reaction, making a gesture in which she banged her wrists together in disgust, and was far from happy in her post-match press conference.
‘I’m not sure that a lot of people were understanding what’s happening. It’s probably been a lot of Pimm’s throughout the day,’ she said.
‘I feel like it’s been pretty consistent for the last 18, 19 months. I haven’t done anything wrong, but keep getting different treatment sometimes.
‘But what can I say about the crowd? There is nothing to say. She doesn’t want to shake hands with Russian, Belarusian people. I respected her decision.
‘What should I have done? Stayed and waited? Like, I mean, there’s no thing that I could do that would have been right, so I just did what I thought was respectful towards her decision.
‘But this conversation about shaking hands is not a life-changing conversation. So if you guys want to keep talking about it, bring it up, make it a big deal, headlines, whatever it is, keep going.
‘I thought it was a great tennis match. If people are going to be focusing only on handshakes or crowd, quite drunk crowd, booing in the end, that’s a shame. That’s probably what it is in the end of the day.’
Svitolina, who was booed at the French Open for her stance on not shaking hands, had little sympathy for her opponent, saying: ‘I got the same in Paris. I played three matches in Paris in this way.
‘For me personally I think the tennis organisations have to come out with a statement that there will be no handshake between the Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian players because maybe it’s not clear for people, some people don’t really know what is happening.’
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