{"id":300496,"date":"2025-12-05T13:43:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T13:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/300496\/"},"modified":"2025-12-05T13:43:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T13:43:08","slug":"anastasia-potapova-switches-allegiance-from-russia-to-austria-after-visa-approved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/300496\/","title":{"rendered":"Anastasia Potapova switches allegiance from Russia to Austria after visa approved"},"content":{"rendered":"<p data-testid=\"wcl-typoNewsPerex\" itemprop=\"description\">Anastasia Potapova has become the latest Russian-born tennis player to switch international allegiance after the world number 51 said her application for Austrian citizenship was approved.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.flashscore.com\/player\/potapova-anastasia\/x81l09qG\/\" data-analytics-element=\"ARTICLE_TEXT_LINK\" data-analytics-alias=\"internal\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Potapova<\/a>, 24, has been playing on the WTA Tour as a neutral athlete after Russian and Belarusian players were banned from competing under their own flags following Moscow&#8217;s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.<\/p>\n<p>Daria Kasatkina (Australia), Varvara Gracheva (France), Elina Avanesyan (Armenia), Maria Timofeeva (Uzbekistan) and Natela Dzalamidze (Georgia) have all switched allegiance since the Russian invasion.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I am delighted to let you all know that my application for citizenship has been accepted by the Austrian government,&#8221; Potapova posted on social media on Thursday.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;As part of this I am proud to announce that starting from 2026 I will be representing my new homeland Austria in my professional tennis career from this point onwards.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Potapova had been issued a formal warning by the WTA in 2023 for wearing a T-shirt of Russian soccer team Spartak Moscow before her match against Jessica Pegula at Indian Wells.<\/p>\n<p>Her actions had been viewed as a public show of support for Russia and drew criticism from Iga Swiatek but she later said she had supported Spartak since she was 13 and saw no provocation in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anastasia Potapova has become the latest Russian-born tennis player to switch international allegiance after the world number 51&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-300496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}