Guido Pella denounces unequal treatment after the Benoit Paire case
Guido Pella and Hugo Dellien were forced to quarantine after their fitness trainer tested positive in New York City. Now Pella comments on the last few days and raises the question of why the treatment of Benoit Paire's contact persons looks a little different.
by Michael Rothschädl
last edit: Sep 03, 2020, 08:01 am
The outcry was great when Hugo Dellien and Guido Pella were taken out of the tournament before the start of the Western & Southern Open last week and then ordered into room quarantine. The fitness coach of the two South Americans was tested positive for COVID-19 during the tests in the run-up to the two tournaments in New York City, and Pella and Dellien were classified as close contacts.
Now the small series of events in the USA has one corona case, one day before the start of the US Open, Benoit Paire, the first player on site, tested positive for COVID-19. The French are considered to be a great "socializer", and the circle of people with whom Paire would have had "closer contact" was correspondingly large. To be more precise, this circle is eleven people, for whom it is now necessary to keep the "bubble in the bubble".
Pella denounces unequal treatment
This enables the players to take part in the US Open, but at the same time stricter rules have to be adhered to: A large part of the leisure program is not accessible to those athletes, besides training and matches, some of them hardly leave the room. Regulations that make perfect sense to shield the virus. Regulations that did not exist in the Dellien and Pella cases.
A circumstance that Pella now denounces in an interview after his first round with the now second major of the year. "I want to know why they did that to us and not the same with the French," Ubitennis.com quoted the Argentine as saying. "I just want to know why they did this to us and why they didn't give us any information. I'm angry with them for changing the rules when Benoit tested positive."
In addition to this unequal treatment, communication with the organizers following the quarantine regulation should not have gone as desired at all, as Pella said in the press conference after his departure: According to the protocol, it would not have been a problem in the run-up to the tournament to have contact with a positive COVID case as long as you do not share a room with them. But when the two players were informed that they had to go into quarantine, they wanted to know, as befits their standing, why this was so, this is not in the protocol.
"After that we didn't get a single call from them. Nothing at all," continued Pella. Afterwards, they asked for various things, such as courts for training and fitness equipment, in order not to let the time pass completely unused. "We didn't get an answer until Thursday and Friday." The athletes were then provided with training equipment and training grounds, but these would have been of "very poor quality," as Pella emphasizes.
USTA states that it has not changed the standards
The training ground, for example, "would not have had anything to do with those at the US Open, it would have been so bad, it was difficult to train on it at all." Overall, the conditions were "terrible", as the South American emphasized several times during the interview. But it got particularly bad at the moment when Benoit Paire was positively tested for the corona virus.
"They said," Okay, you have a bubble in the bubble to keep, but you can play the US Open. "Imagine how you would feel if that happened to you? They got this treatment, and we these. It was very uneven in the entire two weeks, "said a visibly frustrated Guido Pella. Christopher Clarey, a journalist for the New York Times, had learned from the USTA that the standards for the new cases had not been changed. The American Tennis Association, however, still owes answers to the two athletes, Guido Pella and Hugo Dellien.