Wimbledon stands alone. Tennis’s most prestigious major plays by its own rules. It has a dress code all its own. It’s played on grass, the least common, most idiosyncratic surface. At a great cost to its balance sheets, it has virtually no signage, no naming rights and, until this year, no play on its middle Sunday.
Sometimes Wimbledon’s autonomy works to its benefit. The tournament canceled the 2020 edition because, alone among the majors, it had the good sense to purchase pandemic insurance. Sometimes Wimbledon’s autonomy works to its detriment: It was the last of the majors to pay men and women equal wages. Today, Wimbledon, acting alone as ever, has committed an outrageous unforced error.
Wednesday morning, The New York Times was the first outlet to report that Wimbledon plans to ban Russian and Belarusian players from the 2022 tournament, a form of both protest and punishment for the war in Ukraine.
