It is not a scoop, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia drags its share of repercussions on the sporting world.
In tennis, some tournaments, like Wimbledon which ended at the beginning of the month, have decided to purely and simply exclude Russian and Belarusian players.
A position which therefore deprived Andrey Rublev but also the world number 1, Daniil Medvedev, of the prestigious London tournament.
The first quoted returned to this episode in a video published by the Russian Youtuber Vitya Kravchenko.
“Regarding Wimbledon, I probably should have changed my nationality.
It would have been acceptable for them,” he says jokingly before considering this possibility more seriously.
“If we are totally banned from all tournaments and I want to continue my career, that could be a solution,” he concedes.
Proposed solutions
However, number 8 at ATP assures him, all the players concerned have proposed several solutions to the organizing bodies to prove their non-involvement in this conflict.
“We had offered to play mixed doubles with Ukrainian players.
We wanted to use tennis to prove that we are not fighting and there is no war in tennis.
As a tennis player I could have delivered the right message but I always got the same answer that the Russian government would use our results for propaganda purposes,” he says.
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At the very beginning of the Russian invasion, Rublev had written about a message in favor of peace on a camera during the Dubai tournament.
After his semi-final victory against the Polish Herbert Hurkacz, he had written in white marker “no war please” (no war please).