Spain’s Sara Sorribes Tormo believes she and her doubles partner did nothing wrong when suggesting their opponent should be disqualified from a match at the French Open.
The world No.132 was playing in the third round of the women’s doubles tournament alongside Marie Bouzková. Taking on Miyu Kato and Aldila Sutjiadi, the Spanish-Czech duo took the opening set before falling behind 1-3 in the second. Then at the end of that game, Kato hit a ball to the other end of the court which accidentally struck a ball girl in the head.
Initially, Kato was issued with a code violation for unsportsmanlike conduct before both Tormo and Muchova were heard on the microphone saying that she should be defaulted, according to the rulebook. Subsequently, the tournament supervisor was called to court and following a discussion Kato ended up being disqualified from the match.
Following the incident, Tormo and Bouzkova were accused of deliberately trying to get their opponent disqualified. An allegation that Tormo denied following her marathon fourth round loss to Brazil’s Beatriz Haddad Maia which lasted three hours and 51 minutes. In French Open history, only two other women’s singles matches have lasted longer.
“It’s a very bad situation that happened yesterday,” she said. “For Marie and me it’s tough to have all these kinds of things that people are saying. It’s not easy because the only thing we’ve done yesterday was go to the referee and explain to him what happened.”
“We were saying that the ball kid was crying because we were scared. Then we were saying that the ball was direct because he didn’t see the ball.”
Continuing to protest her innocence, Tormo added there was no wrongdoing on her part.
“All the rest of the decision was taken by the supervisor. I think it’s not our thing or we haven’t done anything bad. That’s the only thing I’m going to say about this,” she added.
Due to being defaulted, Kato lost all of her ranking points and prize money earned at the tournament. She has since issued an apology on social media about what she describes as an ‘unfortunate mishap’ before adding that her shot ‘was completely unintentional.’
Tormo and Bouzkova will next play sixth seeds Ellen Perez and Nicole Melichar-Martinez.
