There is a video that will not leave you easily once you have seen it. Two tennis players sprint off a court in the United Arab Emirates as a loud explosion ruptures the air nearby. The match was Daniil Ostapenkov versus Hayato Matsuoka at the Fujairah Challenger, a second-tier ATP Challenger Tour event in the northeast of the Emirates, on a Tuesday in early March 2026. The war between Iran and a US-Israeli coalition had already been on for multiple days. Drones had been intercepted. Oil installations at the Port of Fujairah were on fire. Smoke was visible from the city. And the ATP did very little to pre-empt the tournament, it wasn’t surprising at all.
It should not surprise anyone who has watched the ATP operate over the past decade. The organisation has made a habit of treating serious problems as though they were public relations inconveniences and treating money as though it were a moral compass.
The Fujairah mess
The Fujairah situation was, in fairness, an escalation nobody had anticipated. When the Challenger was first scheduled, the region was stable enough. But the facts on the ground were not subtle. Bombs had been falling on Iran since the weekend. Iranian forces were retaliating with drones directed at US-aligned Gulf states, the UAE among them. The US State Department had urged American citizens to leave the region. Several European governments were expected to issue similar guidance.
Daniil Medvedev, fresh off winning his 23rd tour title in Dubai, found himself stranded. Andrey Rublev was stranded, too. Airspace over the UAE had been suspended. Medvedev, his family and his team had no clear exit. Rublev reportedly made plans to drive to Oman and attempt a flight from there.
There are valid questions as to why the Fujairah tournament was not called off before play began. Bombs had been falling since Sunday. By Monday, French players on site were telling L’Equipe that life felt “completely normal”. Within twenty-four hours, that assessment had been shattered, which is precisely what happens in wars, which is precisely why you do not hold tennis tournaments during them.
When the evacuation came, it came suddenly, mid-match, with players running off the court in visible fear. That is not bad luck. That is the foreseeable consequence of choosing carefully planned schedules and prize money over the welfare of athletes competing in a region under aerial bombardment.
Heat and Neglect
It would be easier to forgive the ATP for the Fujairah episode if it represented an unusual failure of judgment. It does not. The organisation has a documented pattern of prioritising commercial interests over the people who actually play the sport.
Consider what happened at the 2023 US Open. Temperatures inside Arthur Ashe Stadium reached the mid-thirties Celsius, with humidity pushing the felt temperature even higher. Players were using ice packs, inhalers and courtside hoses of cold air simply to survive their matches. In the quarterfinal between Medvedev and Rublev, both men visibly deteriorated across nearly three hours of play.
Medvedev needed the trainer twice, required an inhaler to manage his breathing, and described losing his vision entirely toward the end of the first set. Rublev’s heart was racing between points. During the third set, Medvedev walked to a courtside camera and said into it: “You cannot imagine. One player is gonna die, and they’re gonna see.”
He was not being dramatic. Earlier that summer, Chinese player Wu Yibing had collapsed during a match in Washington. The heat was a documented, worsening problem, one the AP had been tracking statistically for years, showing temperatures at major tournaments climbing steadily upward. And what did the US Tennis Association do in response?
It partially closed the retractable roof on Arthur Ashe to block the sun, a measure so half-hearted that the shadows it cast made the ball difficult to see and disrupted play differently. Rublev, asked whether he was concerned for his own health, said with bleak honesty that he was not even thinking about it. The sport required him to compete, so he competed.
The ATP’s response to the broader heat crisis was similarly sluggish. Extreme heat policies were slow to materialise. The Australian Open introduced protections years before the US Open took meaningful action. The machinery of the tour, built around broadcasting windows, sponsorship commitments and ticket revenue, had little appetite for the type of schedule disruption that genuine player protection would demand. Players continued to compete in temperatures that would shut down construction sites in most developed countries, because the calendar was the calendar and the money was the money.
Abuse Allegations Against Zverev
And then there is Alexander Zverev.
In October 2020, Olga Sharypova, Zverev’s former girlfriend, gave interviews describing a pattern of physical abuse she said she experienced during their relationship. The allegations were specific and serious: punching, smothering with a pillow, being pushed against walls. Sharypova said she feared for her life. Zverev denied everything.
The ATP’s initial response was a press release condemning violence in general terms without mentioning Zverev by name. It took nearly a year before the organisation opened a formal investigation. That investigation ran for fifteen months, involved interviews with Sharypova, Zverev and twenty-four others, and concluded in January 2023 with a finding of insufficient evidence and no sanction.
The ATP did not publish its full report. The process that the tour’s CEO described, with a straight face, as “new ground” and “exhaustive”, produced a document the public was not permitted to read, clearing a player who had by then also been accused by a second former partner. The ATP’s handling of the matter was criticised from the beginning as slow, opaque and structurally inclined toward inaction. When Sharypova first went public, the organisation had no domestic violence policy at all. The absence of such a policy was not accidental. It had never been deemed necessary.
The accusations against Zverev became the pressure that forced the ATP to commission a safeguarding review, which ultimately produced a director of safeguarding, hired in March 2023, and a policy still under development long after the damage was done. Throughout this entire period, Zverev continued to compete at the sport’s highest level and was elected by his peers to the ATP’s Player Advisory Council at the start of 2024 while a criminal trial in Germany loomed over his career.
Asked whether it was appropriate to sit on the advisory council given the allegations, Zverev responded: “Why would it not be? Nobody has said anything to me.” It was an answer that said everything about the culture the ATP had cultivated. A second case was eventually settled out of court in 2024, with Zverev paying fines to the state and to charity without any admission of guilt.
The women who accused him faced a less comfortable aftermath. Sharypova, who had moved back to Moscow, told journalists she struggled to find employment because companies did not want to hire her once they learned of her accusations against one of tennis’s most prominent players.
Unseriousness across the board
Professional tennis has spent two decades chasing Middle Eastern money. Dubai. Doha. Abu Dhabi. Saudi Arabia, where the Six Kings Slam was held and where an ATP Masters event is expected to arrive soon. The 2023 ATP Tel Aviv tournament had to be cancelled due to Israel’s war with Hamas.
The financial logic is obvious. The region offers money, infrastructure and an eagerness to host events that Western cities no longer match with the same enthusiasm. What it also offers, as the players stranded in the UAE in March 2026 discovered, is proximity to some of the world’s most volatile geopolitical fault lines.
The ATP is not unique in its pursuit of Gulf money. Football did the same. Formula One did the same. But tennis presents itself as a sport defined by individual integrity and personal excellence. The sport’s marketing has always leaned on the idea of the lone athlete, stripped of teammates and excuses, facing an opponent across a net in conditions that demand total honesty.
That self-image is increasingly difficult to reconcile with an organisation that allowed matches to continue while a war unfolded around its players, that took a year to begin investigating serious abuse allegations against a leading player, and that responded to concerns about athlete safety in lethal heat by pointing to television scheduling constraints.
Medvedev put it plainly himself, standing in ice after his 2023 US Open quarterfinal, shaky and still struggling to see clearly: “Probably we cannot stop the tournament for four days because then it basically ruins everything. The TV, even the tickets, everything. It ruins everything.”
He was not endorsing this logic. He was articulating it as a man who had just spent three hours nearly dying on court and understood exactly why it had been allowed to happen. When the players ran off the court in Fujairah, ducking for cover as a drone was intercepted somewhere overhead, the ATP posted a tweet. The bombs were not the scandal. The tweet was.
Main Photo Credit: Smartframe Images