Is Covid stress fuelling an upsurge in on-court tantrums?

Tennis has always been a mentally demanding sport, but events have created a perfect storm.

Tantrum champion Nick Kyrgios takes his frustrations out on his racquet

As Nick Kyrgios smashed racquets and launched foul-mouthed outbursts towards the umpires during the change of ends in his matches in the US last month, the stark contrast between this and a memorable Wimbledon moment 21 years ago came to mind.

In the second round of the 2001 championships, Barry Cowan, a 26-year-old from Ormskirk, Lancashire, was on the brink of one of the great All England Club upsets in the midst of a fifth set against the seven-time winner Pete ­Sampras. Just as remarkable as Cowan’s performance was the unusual sight of him sitting serenely in his chair with headphones on, listening to music between games.

After narrowly losing the decider 6-3, he told reporters the ­Liverpool football anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone had been his song of choice.

“Being a Liverpool fan, it’s something that made me feel comfortable,” Cowan recalls. “I couldn’t listen to rock music before I walked out to the court. I just had to be calm. If I was too hyped up, it wasn’t my personality. I tried rock a couple of times and I just behaved like an idiot on the court. Calmness was when I played my best tennis.”

Cowan, now a commentator, has observed with interest the striking spike in bad behaviour on the tour this year. Kyrgios and the American rising star Jenson Brooksby both threw racquets that had ball kids diving for cover last month, while the German world No.3, Alexander Zverev, was thrown out of the Mexican Open for repeatedly hitting his racquet against the umpire’s chair in anger at a line call in February.

Last week the ATP chairman, Andrea Gaudenzi, said that “the first three months of the season have seen an unusual frequency of high-profile incidents involving unsportsmanlike conduct”. While Gaudenzi has vowed to hand out stricter punishments in the future, there is a debate as to what is ­suddenly fuelling these tantrums. Tennis has always had its bad boys, but the frequency of explosive incidents recently does seem particularly abnormal.

“Whatever line of business you’re in, your present state of mind will always show under stress and fatigue,” Cowan says. “You can practise great and feel brilliant, but you get in a stressful match situation and that’s where your true feelings come out.”

This would lend itself to the theory of some that the Covid pandemic is to blame. Players have endured unique challenges over the past two years, trying to negotiate the various difficulties in travelling the world and staying in biosecure environments. It is natural, then, that frustration ­bubbling under the surface will manifest itself on the court.

“The testing was so stressful in terms of the sheer volume,” seven-time grand slam doubles cham­pion Jamie Murray says. “If you ended up positive, you were stuck in a hotel in a foreign country for 10 days. You’ve blown it for the next two weeks of events and then you are not ready to compete in the one after that because you’ve lost your fitness.

“Towards the end it started to get too much. It definitely affected the mentality of some players.”

The pandemic cannot be cited as the sole reason behind the unrest. After all, Kyrgios has a long history of throwing tantrums on the court, and there have been very few examples of bad behaviour on the women’s tour in the past two years.

Through the course of several conversations with players, coaches and pundits, other factors were often mentioned. There is a belief that the presence of television cameras for a Netflix documentary series has encouraged some to play up the drama. ­ Kyrgios’s girlfriend, Costeen Hatzi, wore a lapel microphone in the stands during one of his matches in Indian Wells. The decision by the ATP not to suspend Zverev for his actions in Mexico did not help, while the fines being dished out are clearly not hitting players hard enough. The $47,000 fine that Kyrgios got in Miami came to only about 23 per cent of his $207,000 winnings. Bear in mind, too, that tennis has always been regarded as one of the most stressful individual sports. Josephine Perry, a London-based sports psychologist, works with athletes across 26 sports and believes tennis is one of the most mentally demanding.

“It is a really fascinating sport from the psychology side,” Perry says. “We see some big losses of behaviour. I often use tennis as a really good example of how we handle anxiety and the impact it has on the body.

“A good example was Emma Raducanu at the US Open final last year when she had the medical time-out towards the end. You could see her opponent (Leylah Fernandez) getting more and more angry and I told my husband Emma was going to win. You cannot play proper tennis when you are that angry. Your physiology changes. You’ve got that much cortisol and adrenaline flooding through your body. You get tight shoulders and lose your peripheral vision. There is no way you can play great tennis. You’re done for.”

Perry says 80 per cent of her sessions are focused on performance anxiety since the pandemic started. Athletes are struggling to handle the ambiguity of biosecure bubbles and the effect that has ahead of tournaments.

“One of the biggest sources of confidence for athletes is preparation, to know they have done everything it takes to be at their best,” Perry says. “You can’t do that if you haven’t been able to play warm-ups or have people to train with.”

While the recent behaviour of players is unsavoury, one good thing to have come out of the pandemic is that mental health issues are more openly discussed.

Four-time grand slam cham­pion Naomi Osaka said recently that she had started therapy sessions after bouts of depression, and her stance in taking a break from tennis last year resulted in fellow athletes expressing their thanks, including the gymnast Simone Biles at the Tokyo Olympics.

The Times