Roland Garros Tournament Director Defends Controversial Scheduling

| by Balasz Virag

Roland Garros tournament director Amelie Mauresmo created a lot of controversy with her defence of night shift matches mainly being men's matches.

The former player hinted last year that men's matches are matches that garner more interest from fans. The statement might be factually true sometimes but created a lot of controversies because many found the comment to imply that men's matches are better than women's matches.

This year's selection has awarded every single night's match to men which once again got the media to sniff around and get to the bottom of things. After Gael Monfils withdrew from his night match against Holger Rune, the event had a chance to give the WTA a match but they opted for another ATP clash.

Asked about the selection at that time, Mauresmo highlighted that the night slot generally goes to what she thinks is the best match of the day regardless if it's an ATP or WTA one. Her priority when it comes to equality is ensuring that even the top stadiums feature at least two WTA matches during a day, the equal amount of men's matches featured on them.

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Some people asked me before this edition, ‘So, are you going to do five men’s matches and five women’s matches (during the night sessions)?’ I don’t know. For me the priority in equality is definitely to have two women and two men on each court every day. 

We are a unique example of only one match scheduled in the evening, it makes it quite difficult to know in advance. It's a tough one. There is no perfect solution here. We have 15,000 people buying tickets for that match for 10 days so I’m really thinking about what would be the best match of the day. I cannot think at the moment differently on that. But other than that, I believe we are quite equal in pretty much everything that we do. 

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