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By Chris Oddo/ Thursday, January 16, 2014
After three hours and twenty-eight minutes under the
blistering sun, Maria Sharapova shared her thoughts on the
Australian Open’s extreme heat policy in the press room.
Photo Source: Corleve.
Maria Sharapova was disapproving of the
Australian Open’s handling of its extreme heat policy after her
three-set victory over
Karin Knapp of Italy on Thursday in
Melbourne.
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Speaking at a press conference after her three hour and
twenty-eight-minute victory, the World No. 3 Russian expressed
her frustration with what she perceived to be ambiguity in the
policy.
“It’s a tough call. I mean, I think the question I
have is no one really knows what the limit is. Not the
players; the trainers themselves, when you ask them, When
will the roof be closed?No one actually knows what that number is in comparison to
humidity or the actual heat. Sometimes you wish you know,
because it’s–it just depends on I’m not sure who, a referee
or the meteorologist, and there are just a lot of questions
in the air that maybe, you know, should be solved.Because I asked the trainer the other day, What does it take
for the roof to be closed or matches to be stopped? She said,
We have no control over this.”
Oddly, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the tournament took the
words “predetermined threshold” out of its heat policy earlier in
the week. According the the paper, Australian Open
tournamenent referee Wayne McEwen had an
explanation for that:
“I’ve got guidelines which I follow. We don’t want
to have a hard mark as to, OK if it hits this we stop
play.“Because we all know in Melbourne temperatures can fluctuate
very quickly, and if we know it’s going to cool down in the
next half an hour or so we’ll push through that period and
then continue on into the cooler period. But if I know the
temperatures will spike I would rather bring everyone in
earlier rather than later.“We want to have that little bit of flexibility for the
players.”
Sharapova points out that
there is a natural conflict between the rules of the sport and
the safety of the players, something that needs to be
considered.
“I mean, on one hand you’re
trying to get as much rest in between points as you can,” she
said, “but then you have an umpire who is giving you a time
violation.”
It’s not just the players
that are having difficulties with the sweltering heat. The
Sydney Morning Herald reports that there have been 970 people
treated for heat exhaustion.
Many players and journalist
have been calling for more safer, more conservative
policies.
Andy
Murray, last year’s runner-up in Melbourne, also
called for a cautious approach. “As much as it’s easy to say
the conditions are safe–you know, a few people said there’s
doctors and stuff saying it’s fine–it only takes one bad thing
to happen,” said Murray. “And it looks terrible for the whole
sport when people are collapsing, ball kids are collapsing,
people in the stands are collapsing. That’s obviously not
great.”
The tournament makes its
decisions based not on strictly temperature, but the wet bulb
globe temperature, which is also used by military agencies and
OSHA as a guide to managing workload in direct sunlight.
The WBGT
is an index that is measurable, but players
and journalists aren’t privy to this information; most concur
with Sharapova that no WBGT readings are being made available
to them.
The worst part? It’s not
over yet. Temperatures are projected to reach around 105
Fahrenheit on Friday in Melbourne.
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