Hordorff on the Davis Cup postponement: "The emergency brake pulled with Corona reasons"
The ITF announced on Friday that the Davis Cup would be postponed to 2021 due to the corona pandemic. However, critics suspect a deliberate decision by lender Kosmos behind it.
by Florian Goosmann
last edit: Jun 28, 2020, 04:02 pm
The French sports newspaper L'Équipe reported yesterday that Kosmos had lost around 50 million euros in its 2019 premiere. A cancellation this year would save 18 million euros.
DTB Vice President Dirk Hordorff is now hitting the same line. Apparently, it had already been recognized in June that you could not play tennis in Madrid in November 2020, said Hordorff ironically in a post on the tennisredaktion.de website . While the ATP and WTA want to host their women's and men's tournaments in Madrid in September.
"ITF had to put a good face on an evil game"
As early as 2016, the German Tennis Association had already predicted "in which disaster the 'Kosmos / Pique project' for the ITF would end," continued the DTB vice. "After Kosmos put many millions in the sand in the first year of 2019, many encounters except for the home team games of the Spaniards took place in front of partially empty ranks, the Corona reason was probably the emergency brake here. Not the ITF, but Kosmos. And the ITF had no choice but to make a good face out of bad play. "
That would cost the ITF many millions - which would actually be urgently needed for the development of the sport of tennis. "The longer the ITF takes to realize that this project will fail, the greater the damage will be in the end."
Hordorff's conclusion: they only wanted to make quick money, contrary to the advice of experts. The ITF had to sit down with the nations involved and develop a new strategy.