Steve Price: Arrival of Aus Open tennis stars a slap in the face

How can you tell a father of a disabled girl he doesn’t qualify for an exemption to return from NSW, but Novak Djokovic can jet in and set himself up in a suite at the Hyatt?

Letting international tennis stars into our state when so many are still locked out in NSW is a slap in the face, writes Steve Price.

In one week the world’s best tennis players and their entourages from around the world will be allowed to fly into Melbourne for a sporting event.

Chances are when these professional tennis players and their support staff — a thousand visitors in total — arrive there will still be Victorians locked out of their own state by a border closure.

As the week ended, an estimated 2300 Victorians remained in NSW, locked out by the Victorian government’s decision to shut the border to NSW.

COVID-19 response commander Jeroen Weimar predicted this week that the border would be closed until the end of the month, meaning some of those Victorians will not even be able to get their children back for the start of the school year on January 27.

Border crossing permits are mired in red-tape delays with less than 200 issued this past week.

People are surviving in caravan parks and cheap motels, unable to get back to work, and yet the same Victorian government is allowing millionaire sports stars and hangers-on to fly straight into Melbourne.

Novak Djokovic will fly into Melbourne for the Australian Open. Picture: AFP

This is the latest example of COVID-19 madness and 2021 is set to start as crazily as 2020 ended.

Can someone in charge explain to me and other Victorians how you can tell the father of a disabled girl he isn’t able to qualify for an exemption to return home, but Novak Djokovic can jet in and set himself up in a suite at the Hyatt Hotel?

Once here, the 2020 Australian Open champion can leave that hotel for five hours every day for practice. Novak and every other international and local player will be transported to a training facility to hit tennis balls.

These over-protected sports stars demanded that if they were going to grace us with their presence they must be allowed to practice, or they wouldn’t be coming.

And if one of them tests positive to COVID-19 and can’t play, it’s reported they will still receive 50 per cent of their prize money.

After what all Australians have been through since early March — Melburnians especially — are we really prepared to put everything we have done in defeating this virus at risk for a couple of sporting events.

Playing Test cricket at the SCG in front of 10,000 supposedly mask-wearing cricket fans is mad enough but — especially after our current scare from the MCG — allowing the Australian Open tennis with its international cast of characters to proceed is irresponsible.

To stage it while local residents from the city its being played in are locked out of their own state, unable to come home and go to work, is a stupid slap in the face.

Clearly, event organisers and the state government have learned nothing from the events of Saturday, March 14, last year. On that morning as patrons queued at the gates of Albert Park eager to get into watch day two of the Formula 1 action, they were told to go home.

That decision should have been made days if not weeks earlier, and remember it was made off the positive COVID-19 case of one F1 crew member.

Even allowing a crowd of 10,000 people per day at the SCG for the Test is madness. Picture: Getty

And someone thinks flying 1000 people on various airlines into Melbourne from countries now — unlike back in March 2020 — devastated by the virus is a good idea.

Why state governments around Australia think prioritising live sport with crowds over the health of their citizens who have been through virus lockdowns is a good idea is beyond me.

Take NSW, in the middle of the third cricket Test between Australia and India at the SCG. The crowds are limited to 10,000 a day but that’s 10,000 a day potentially for five days.

This in a state still grappling with spotfire virus outbreaks across suburban Sydney. To allow even that small number to use public transport to and from the ground, mixing with venue staff and repeating their journey back home, is madness.

Even Sydney Cricket Ground Trust chairman Tony Shepherd admits “running events with very small crowds costs us money”.

Shepherd went on to confess his organisation will make “zero” money from the Test but that casual workers will at least get some wages. I know and admire Shepherd — also chairman of the Greater Western Sydney Giants — but surely running a loss-making game of cricket for just a handful of diehard fans isn’t worth the risk of plunging NSW and its economy back into lockdown.

Tennis Australia has tried to soothe any anxiety about its event being a potential virus superspreader with a range of crowd control measures. The Melbourne Park venue will be divided into three separate ticketed zones — green/blue/purple — and patrons limited to moving around those zones.

Sensible planning, but it’s the importation of a thousand participants that poses the greatest risk to what is now virtually a virus-free state — one of few such places, incidentally, anywhere in the world.

The players and their support staff have already been ejected from their COVID-19 bubble hotel — The Westin in the CBD — by residents worried about infection.

A new venue has been found but surely that was a warning shot across the bows of those championing staging the Open.

Crowds at the Aus Open will be divided into zones, but it’s the international players that will pose the greatest risk.

Physical distancing inside the venue in food and beverage queues will be advised but anyone who has been to the Open and spent any time in Garden Square knows how hard that will be to police.

The internationals will be tested up to six times while they are here — including before departure — but we all have nightmares still about the virus escaping hotel quarantine and causing the deaths of more than 800 people.

Do we really want to take that risk again given the pain and suffering that caused us all?

Are we all willing to again go into harsh stage-four lockdown because we knowingly let the virus back in so we could stage a tennis tournament?

We would all, in normal circumstances, welcome one of the few truly international sporting events staged in this country to go ahead but is it really worth the risk?

Just as the Formula 1 Grand Prix scheduled for March has been shuffled back in the calendar so should have been this grand slam event.

Victorians have made so many sacrifices in personal and workplace lives this past year that a delayed Open at best, or no Open at worst, would be acceptable to most.

After all, motorsport fans lost the Grand Prix mid-event, the AFL season started in an empty MCG and eventually moved to Queensland — Grand Final included — and our famous horse race, the Melbourne Cup, was staged at virtually an empty Flemington.

The rush to start 2021 with crowds to make a statement that this year will be different simply doesn’t stack up.

Let’s hope I’m wrong.

Originally published as Steve Price: Arrival of Aus Open tennis stars a slap in the face