Tennis
A terrible incident at Wimbledon. Tennis players and fans were urgently expelled from the court
For the sake of saving a man, the match of a prestigious tournament was interrupted for more than an hour.
Four years ago at Wimbledon there was a terrible incident. During the third round match, all spectators and players were taken off the court for the sake of one fan.
When the tension in the match reached its maximum, an elderly woman became ill in one of the stands. For some time, the doctors on duty tried to pump her out, but the visitor to the most prestigious grassy tournament of the season did not come herself. The organizers called an ambulance, and the match was suspended.
passed out
In 2019, Kazakhstani Mikhail Kukushkin and German Jan-Lennard Struff met in the third round of Wimbledon. Both players did not grab the stars from the sky, but they confidently kept in the top hundred of the ATP rating. Entering the second week of the Grand Slam tournament for both players would be a real breakthrough.
From the very first minutes, the Kazakhstani played an aggressive game, which is why Struff made blunders and allowed Mikhail to take game after game. In the first two sets, the German tried to resist, but Kukushkin was stronger. By the third set, Jan-Lennard still got together and kept his chances of winning. The fourth set promised to be key.
The atmosphere heated up to the limit when the score was 2:2, but the match was interrupted by a fatal accident: suddenly the spectator on the podium became ill. A 60-year-old woman had a heart attack and lost consciousness. People immediately gathered around the woman, everyone tried to help in some way. Mikhail was the first to notice something was wrong and informed the referee on the tower about it. Doctors on duty ran out to the woman, they tried to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but she did not come to her senses. The organizers called an ambulance and, so that no one would interfere with its passage to the stands, they asked all spectators and players to leave the court.
Everyone present was shocked by what had happened. The match was suspended: the players were given the opportunity to take a breath and tune in to the match again, and the woman was taken to the nearest hospital.
“There are things more important than sports”
An hour later, the game resumed. The pause benefited Kukushkin: the tennis player recovered and completed the match in his favor in four games. Struff, although he was upset by the result, admitted that the terrible episode taught him a lot.
“Today we realized that there are things more important than sports. I hope the woman who lost consciousness during the match will recover very soon,” Struff wrote on his social networks.
An elderly spectator woke up in the hospital, and her life was no longer in danger. And Mikhail Kukushkin, having beaten the German, not only secured access to the fourth round of Wimbledon, but also showed his best result in the Grand Slam tournaments. In the next match, he met with the Japanese Kei Nishikori, the eighth racket of the world at that time, and lost in four sets.
Xenia Antonova
Source: Sportbox
I am a sports journalist who has written for a number of Sportish. I have a background in journalism and have been writing since I was young. My main focus is sports news, but I also write about general news. I am currently working as an author at Sportish.