told Clay magazine, external<\/a> in an interview listened to and verified by BBC Sport.<\/p>\n“It’s very difficult for a woman to do it because the crowd is very annoying and you need to have a lot of courage to go against the crowd.<\/p>\n
“I knew it [the crowd] was going to be like that. It didn’t harm me, it only strengthened him.”<\/p>\n
Asked whether having a male umpire would have made a difference, Vallejo added: “Yes, yes, absolutely. The crowd was really disrespectful, but I understand it because they are supporting their home player.”<\/p>\n
Vallejo has since taken to social media to defend his comments, stating on X that they have been “taken out of context” and he was referring to Carvalho specifically, rather than all female umpires.<\/p>\n
The French Open added: “The tournament strongly condemns all sexist remarks, regardless of who makes them, and offers its support to the match umpire and, more broadly, to all the tournament’s umpiring officials.”<\/p>\n
The Grand Slam rulebook states that players “shall at all times conduct themselves in a sportsmanlike manner and give due regard to the authority of officials and the rights of opponents, spectators and others”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vallejo also said he was unhappy with how much time Kouame was given in between points. Players are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672618,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-672617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672617","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=672617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}