Tennis

French Open player issues apology after escaping punishment for hitting child with racquet


Romanian Irina-Camelia Begu has made a grovelling apology after escaping a Novak Djokovic-style disqualification at the French Open for bouncing her racquet into the crowd and hitting a child. The world No 63 was a break of serve down in the third set against Ekaterina Alexandrova when she threw her racquet at her chair in frustration.

But it bounced up and hit a young boy sitting by the umpire’s chair. The match was suspended as the crying boy was comforted by his parents.

The tournament referee arrived to mediate between Begu, umpire Anis Ressaissi and the child’s family. The result was a code violation for unsportsmanlike conduct for the incident and Begu recovered to win 6-7, 6-3, 6-4.

At the end of the match, Begu went over to the child and posed for photos and took him in her arms. But Russian No 30 Alexandrova was furious that Begu was not defaulted – and later received her own warning for smashing her racquet into her bag and arguing with the umpire.

Djokovic was infamously thrown out of the 2020 US Open for hitting a ball into the throat of a line judge to end his 29-match winning streak while Alexander Zverev was defaulted from Mexican Open in February for repeatedly smashing his racquet on the ground in front of the umpire.

After returning to court to win a doubles match, Begu was reluctant to speak about the incident in a press conference. She did however issue an apology and label it an “embarrassing moment”.

“It’s an embarrassing moment for me, so I don’t want to talk too much about it,” she said. “I just want to apologise.

“My whole career I didn’t do something like this, and I feel really bad and sorry. So I’m just going to say again, sorry for the incident and, yeah, it was just an embarrassing moment for me.

“It was a difficult moment because I didn’t want to hit that racquet. You hit the clay with the racquet, but you never expect to fly that much. It was, as I said, an embarrassing moment for me and I just want to end it and not talk about it and apologise again.”

Begu will face France’s Leolia Jeanjean in the third round at Roland Garros on Saturday. Win that and she will face either American 11th seed Jessica Pegula or Tamara Zidansek, the Slovakian 24th seed.





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