Tsitsipas Brothers Among Most Fined Players At 2024 Roland Garros

Sunday, 09 June 2024 at 16:30

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byNurein Ahmed

Stefanos Tsitsipas and his younger brother Petros Tsitsipas will depart Roland Garros with a fraction of their prize money docked from their payslip.

That is because the tournament sanctioned them for multiple cases of code violations related to excessive coaching. This is obviously not a major surprise, considering their history.

In April, Tsitsipas was warned by the chair umpire Nacho Forcadell during a match at the Barcelona Open after his father Apostolos went overboard with coaching, to the point where it became a dialogue.

Coaching in professional tennis was long banned, but the rules were revised for the past year. Players are able to receive verbal instructions and hand signals initiated by their coach, but there are limits to this, which the Tsitsipas family did not adhere to in three separate matches this week.

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According to L'Equipe, two of those fines were for doubles. Stefanos and Petros beat the defending champions, Austin Krajicek and Ivan Dodig, to reach the quarterfinal. However, they breached the coaching rules instituted in the Grand Slam rulebook.

The Tsitsipas family was fined a substantial amount of €21,200, of which €4,600 and €9,200 were in doubles and a further €7,400 in the singles quarterfinal, where Stefanos lost to Carlos Alcaraz in straight sets. The total is among the highest that the French Open organizers have collected regarding fines.

The single largest sanction at this event will be borne by home player Terence Atmane, who was fined €23,000 after smacking a ball out of pure frustration in his first-round defeat to Sebastian Ofner that flew into the stands and hit a spectator on a knee.

For the Tsitsipas family, who collected €495,000 in total prize money, it is only just a tiny fraction, but for Atmane, he will get a significant reduction in pay (first round loser earns €73,000).