The Australian Open and all regional tournaments would be held in Melbourne in January as organizers aim to minimize health risks for players during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Australian Tennis Federation plans to move the tournaments normally held in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Hobart to Melbourne, where a quarantine site and a center for training and matches will be set up.
However, it must still be authorized.
Australia’s international borders are mostly closed and various travel restrictions remain between the nation’s states.
On Monday, the federation told The Associated Press that they were still working on logistics issues, such as tournament draw sizes and schedules, for the weeks leading up to the Australian Open, which is scheduled to kick off on January 18. . The ATP Cup is scheduled to begin in the country on January 1.
But Daniel Andrews, Prime Minister of the state of Victoria, where Melbourne is located, commented during a press conference that the plan to host all the tournaments in the city was “far from a done deal”.
“The notion that this is a done deal and that all these players are going to show up, no, it’s not settled at all,” Andrew said, according to The Australian Associated Press. “The public health authorities need to authorize all these arrangements and they are simply not determined.”
Mark Handley, who is the general manager of the ATP Cup and the tournament director for Brisbane, said the federation’s plan to move all tournaments to a safe zone was designed to provide some certainty for players.
He noted that the fact that hundreds of players and their entourages were coming from all over the world was the “deciding factor” in determining whether the tournaments were centralized, and local organizers continued to work with the ATP and WTA to finalize the schedule. .
Under the federation’s plans, international players are scheduled to start arriving in Australia in mid-December, to be quarantined for 14 days.
