The International Tennis Federation said on Friday the \u200dperformance of a wildcard player at a women’s tournament in Nairobi was “unacceptable” \u200bfor a World Tennis Tour (WTT) event and that it was reviewing procedures for awarding \u200cwildcards.<\/p>\n
The comments followed a first-round match at \u200can ITF W35 event in Kenya that went viral after wildcard Hajar Abdelkader<\/a> lost 6-0, 6-0 in 37 minutes<\/a>, committing 20 \u2060double faults and appearing unfamiliar with basic \u200celements of the game, prompting organisers to say \u200bthe wildcard should not have been granted.<\/p>\n “As the Tournament Operator and \u200dNational Association, Tennis Kenya had understood that Ms Abdelkader was of an appropriate standard \u200dto compete. \u200cThe outcome showed this was clearly not the case and was unacceptable for a World Tennis Tour event, along with \u2060being unfortunate for the player,” an ITF spokesperson said.<\/p>\n “We acknowledge proportionate measures must be taken to prevent this happening again. We are exploring ways to ensure that, by assessing the process of awarding wildcards with consideration to a minimum playing standards requirement to compete at a WTT event.”<\/p>\n The WTT provides competitive opportunities \u2060for nearly 11,000 players each year \u200cacross more than 1,250 events in more than 75 countries, serving as the main pathway to the top levels of the sport, with entry-level tournaments \u2060still offering prize money and \u200branking points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The International Tennis Federation said on Friday the \u200dperformance of a wildcard player at a women’s tournament in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400010,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-400009","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}