Satirical weekly review: game, set & war: Wimbledon excludes Russian tennis players from the tournament

The insight of the week, you don’t have to hire a market research institute for this, is: Open letters are more en vogue than ever before. Then there’s the question: isn’t Fynn Kliemann, the cute, slightly spoiled sense influencer, maybe not down to the lower edge of his cute surfer boy image a father Theresa who is concerned about nothing other than charity? And then, of course, the intellectual balancing act of the hypocrisy fighters in the libertarian morass of the dilemma: Should Russian tennis professionals be excluded from the tournament in Wimbledon? As you can see, this is going to be a fast-paced review. Monothematic was yesterday. This week has been a cornucopia of absurdities. And that doesn’t even include Sahra Wagenknecht.

But first things first: The organizers of what is probably the most famous tennis event in the world, the tournament in Wimbledon, have decided due to Russia’s progressive violations of international law that Russian athletes are not allowed to enter the sacred English lawn of the London elite tournament this year.

It is now the case that very few Russian tennis professionals make military decisions in the Russian government at the same time or belong to Putin’s closest advisory circle in war tactical strategy meetings. The decision therefore immediately led to vehement expressions of indignation across all opinion-intensive communication camps.

From the constantly outraged AfD catalysts, who traditionally feel more comfortable on Russian soil than on democratic soil, to a lot of professional colleagues like Novak Djokovic or Rafael Nadal, to the bubble-relevant explainers from the self-adulation department. Suddenly everyone agreed: excluding the poor Russian tennis pros, well, of course that’s going too far.

Of course, the single tennis pro from Russia neither ordered the war against Ukraine, nor did he intend to put his stamp on the Feltball Festival with a “Putin Forever” shirt on the Wimbledon green. Nevertheless, I think there is no alternative to the exclusion. The argument that athletes can’t help it and are now being prevented from doing their jobs for no reason can hardly be surpassed in terms of hypocrisy.

Where was the call for separation of job and nationality when FIFA banned Russian football professionals from the 2022 World Cup? Some part-time experts on contact debt overdrafts say a soccer team represents a country, but a tennis player doesn’t. Individual fates before team fates. Aha. So a football team doesn’t consist of 23 young professional athletes?

By the way: Wimbledon takes place every year, a World Cup only every four years. From a mathematical point of view alone, the tennis pro can be back in twelve months. The football professional in four years at the earliest. Well, perhaps this skewed evaluation selection also plays a role that the World Cup will take place in Qatar and one sometimes wishes that the German national team, which in a fit of marketing brilliance now only acts as “The Team”, would refrain from participating.

But forget it: if the self-appointed general representatives of public discourse, in their liberal-hysterical euphoria about ingenuity, have decided that there are differences: free. Then, however, you should also prepare an argument in case someone ever asks you why you think it is unfair for high-paid tennis millionaires to have to sit out a tournament just because their country is slaughtering civilians and Europe is threatening nuclear war while they don’t care about the millions of unpopular Russians who have lost their jobs entirely and face economic ruin due to Western reactions to the war.

When basically all global players like Starbucks, McDonald’s or Daimler stopped doing business in Russia and closed their shops, people who were at least as little to blame for the war in Ukraine as Russian tennis professionals lost their jobs. Except they don’t have a comfortable cushion of cash to make up for their job loss. Why do you feel sorry for millionaires but not for ordinary people?

Duchess Kate as a propaganda catalyst

The exclusion of Russian individual athletes from tournaments like Wimbledon also has numerous political levels, which surprisingly play no role in the knee-jerk immediate counter-speech of the do-gooders from the VIP balcony of the Twitter world explainers. Ironically, with the discourse luminaries, who otherwise pride themselves on illuminating a process from absolutely all sides.

As there are: Many connoisseurs of the Russian sports system say unequivocally: If you don’t conform to the regime in Russia, you can’t be successful in sports under any circumstances, just like in the GDR. For the subsidies and opportunities to practice your sport, you have to show your loyalty to the government to the tips of your hair.

If, contrary to expectations, no Russian professionals are present, a few Russians who have been brainwashed by Putin’s media synchronization may ask themselves whether everything that Putin is doing in Ukraine is not so fantastic and just. Moreover, Putin and his propaganda industry would immediately reinterpret successes by Russian tennis pros at Wimbledon as a victory against the hated West and as a symbol of the Russian system’s superiority over evil capitalism. Culminating in the communicative meltdown of image-controlled public perception, when on the final Sunday, in front of hundreds of millions of TV viewers, Duchess Kate might have to hand over the winner’s trophy to a Russian athlete. What would such images say to the already sufficiently manipulated Russian citizens?

Open letters, open questions

Meanwhile, what Alice Schwarzer would say to them seems clear: Putin is only still at war with Ukraine because the Ukrainian government’s warmongers have still not brought themselves to capitulate. Even the violent reactions to her open letter did not cause Putin’s best propaganda power on German soil to rethink, but rather to radicalize it. Schwarzer followed up in some memorable interviews that generations of behavioral scientists and historians will enjoy. Culminating in a sentence that can hardly be surpassed in terms of fact-immune perpetrator-victim-reversal ideology: “I regret that Volodymyr Zelenskyj does not stop provoking”.

Yes, that’s how I looked too. Imagine such an argument among the Allies who liberated Europe in 1945. Despite historical responsibility, which is greater in Germany than in other EU and NATO countries, Schwarzer ultimately mocks: How dare the President of Ukraine not have given up and surrendered long ago. If wars could be won through unrealistic aggressor polemics, Alice Schwarzer would have ensured world peace.

Now, also because I had to experience “Anne Will” and a Harald Welzer while writing the lines for this text, who apparently fell into a pot with arrogance magic potion as a child, I typed myself so much in a rage that for the third topic is no longer a place. Maybe I’ll pick up Fynn Kliemann, the Robin Hood of medical masks, again next week. By then he must have learned that Vietnam is not a city in Portugal after all. In this sense: Fin Kliemann.