After following through with her promise of skipping French Open press conference, Naomi Osaka is fined $15,000, withdraws from Grand Slam
Japan's Naomi Osaka celebrates after winning against Romania's Patricia Maria Tig during their women's singles first round tennis match of The Roland Garros 2021 French Open.One of the few unmistakably good things to come out of the pandemic is that even those who had never before really grasped the importance of good mental health surely get it now. Demand for mental-health services has soared over the past 15 months, and “languishing” is now a part of corporate vocabulary.
Last week, Naomi Osaka, the world’s No. 2-ranked women’s tennis player, announced in a social-media post that she would not be doing any press during Roland Garros, the French Open tennis competition that began on Sunday. But many suggested her note was focused on her own well-being. “I’ve often felt that people have no regard for athletes mental health and this rings very true whenever I see a press conference or partake in one,” she said, explaining that she had “watched many clips of athletes breaking down after a loss in the press room. … I believe that whole situation is kicking a person while they’re down and I don’t understand the reasoning behind it.
Over the ensuing days, as the rest of the players in the French Open main draw fulfilled their press obligations, none of them exactly criticized Osaka; but neither were they rushing to join her revolution. “The press is part of the job,” Ash Barty shrugged. Rafael Nadal said while he respects and understands Osaka’s decision, “without the [press] who are writing the news and achievements that we are having around the world, we probably will not be the athletes that we are today.
In the aftermath of her withdrawal, expressions of sympathy for Osaka and critiques of Roland Garros poured in, in roughly equal measure. That seems fair: Just when Roland Garros and the rest of the Grand Slam gang were supposed to be playing empathic HR professionals, they’d turned into the tennis world’s hall monitors.Still, it’s worth pointing out that, in her post on Monday, Osaka acknowledged she had announced her media boycott “pre-emptively.
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