When the Australian Open comes around in January, all tennis players involved have to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 if they want to be part of the tournament, tournament chief Craig Tiley said.
World Number 1 Novak Djokovic is among those who have declined to declare their vaccination status and said that he would wait until Tennis Australia revealed the health protocols before he takes a call on playing at Melbourne Park.
“We’ll see, we’ll have to wait and see," Djokovic said to reporters after losing his ATP Finals semi-final against Alexander Zverev.
“I haven’t been talking to them (the tournament organisers), to be honest. I was just waiting to hear what the news is going to be, now that I know, we’ll just have to wait and see."
The Australian Open organisers and Victoria state government though are clear that vaccination is a must for the tournament.
“There’s a lot of speculation about vaccination and just to be really clear, when the [state] premier announced that everyone on site ... will need to be vaccinated ... we made that clear to the playing group,” Tiley said.
“(Novak) has said that he views this as a private matter for him. We would love to see Novak here, he knows that he’ll have to be vaccinated to play here.”
“Entry in here will be determined by around early to the middle of December on the entry deadline,” Tiley said. “So you’ll know when a player’s entered an event ... so in the next couple of weeks you will have really good indication of where everyone’s at because at that point there’s an official list of who’s going to be here.”
While Australia’s PM, Scott Morrison, had said that unvaccinated players would be allowed in the country if they served 14 days quarantine and Victoria applied for an exemption.
However, Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, quickly made it clear that no exemptions would be sought for unvaccinated players.
Veteran Rafael Nadal confirmed he would play the Australian Open and is fully vaccinated but Roger Federer, who is also vaccinated will miss the tournament due to injury.
(With inputs from Reuters and AP)
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