Ukraine’s first racket Alexei Krutykh He talked about why top Ukrainian tennis players refused to play for the national team in the Davis Cup match against Hungary.

“We played the free match against Barbados in Turkey at the beginning of March because the war started and we were put before the truth. They said it’s your choice: you can play, you can’t. Of course we all agreed to play for free, we didn’t even think for a minute because that’s the case, the war has just begun. Of course, at a time like this, we will play for Ukraine. It wasn’t really easy there because it was just me and Ilya Marchenko playing. Vitalic [Сачко] and Denis [Молчанов] We got very sick there, so we weren’t even at our full strength.

And it turns out that with Hungary we are also faced with the fact that you play for free. However, we understood that the ITF had allocated players money for the match as prize money. $75,000 was allocated from the ITF for this match, so of course we said it was unfair, it turned out to be a kind of slavery anyway, you should play for free again despite the money being allocated. We did not understand whether the money went to ZSU after Turkey because no one told us about it. I haven’t even seen any information about it.

We were then offered to play for 100,000 hryvnia, but we still realized that it was unfair. They don’t even want to listen to us, they don’t want to listen to our terms either. Therefore, we have decided not to play with the whole team in these conditions as it is not fair. Also, we know how things are with other teams: for example, in Uzbekistan they get 90% of all prize money in case of a win, in Slovakia in general they get 100%. If we calculate how much we want, this is not even fifty percent of the total amount, ”Krutykh said.