There is also a tight crowd in the professional area, especially on the first days of the tournament. “When it rains, all the players and all the guests are in the restaurant and there aren’t many places to sit,” reported Andrea Petkovic after her first-round elimination.
Petkovic wants masks to be compulsory indoors
The 34-year-old also spoke out in favor of the return of a measure in view of her own negative experiences at the French Open. “If I had something to say, I would reintroduce the mask indoors,” she said, but also admitted: “It’s difficult because people also want to go back to normal life. It’s been really hard now, two years, I can understand that.”
The Darmstadt native had been infected with the corona virus around a month before Wimbledon. “I’ve been really sick for three days and then five days flat, I couldn’t have played like that,” said Petkovic. She assumes that she got infected in Paris, where for the first time there was no longer a mask requirement in the cabin. She initially wore a mask for the first three days. “Then people gave me such stupid looks because I was the only one.”
In Wimbledon, too, up to 42,000 spectators crowded the facility without masks, interviews with the professionals were conducted in narrow, windowless rooms. The number of positive tests in England had risen by more than a third to over 100,000 in seven days in the previous week.