World number one Aryna Sabalenka says tennis authorities “follow their interests” with regards to the tennis calendar and are not “focusing on protecting all of us”.<\/p>\n
Players have been raising concerns about the schedule in recent months, saying it is too long and intense.<\/p>\n
Leading players on the women’s tour are expected to play at least 20 mandatory events – four Grand Slams, 10 WTA 1000s and six 500s.<\/p>\n
Belarusian Sabalenka said she would skip some events this year to protect her body.<\/p>\n
“The season is definitely insane, and you see so many players getting injured,” Sabalenka said after her 6-3 6-3 victory over Sorana Cirstea at the Brisbane International.<\/p>\n
“The balls are quite heavy, so it’s a lot of struggle for all of us.”<\/p>\n
Sabalenka and world number two Iga Swiatek were deducted ranking points for not playing enough WTA 500 events last season.<\/p>\n
I’m skipping a couple of events in order to protect my body because I struggled a lot last season,” Sabalenka, 27, added.<\/p>\n
“Even though the results were really consistent, some of the tournaments I had been playing completely sick or I’ve been really exhausted from overplaying.<\/p>\n
“This season we will try to manage it a little bit better, even though they are going to fine me by the end.”<\/p>\n
The WTA Tour has said player welfare will “always remain a top priority”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"World number one Aryna Sabalenka says tennis authorities “follow their interests” with regards to the tennis calendar and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":358724,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-358946","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\/358946","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=358946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/358724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}