There have been two cases of the lights malfunctioning at the maiden edition of the Tallinn Open in Estonia.
The Chinese tournaments on the WTA Tour were canceled for the third year in a row due to COVID-19 restrictions and concerns about the safety of Peng Shuai, who went missing after making a serious accusation against a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
That means a significant gap in the WTA calendar needed to be filled. Anett Kontaveit pushed hard for an event to be held in Estonia. Her attempts were met by very strong political opposition in the country.
However, Kontaveit's attempts paid off when the WTA added the Tallinn Open to the calendar, granting it 250-level status. Unsurprisingly, home hero Kontaveit is among the players who signed up to play in the inaugural iteration of the tournament.
The Estonian No. 1 faced Xiyu Wang in the opening round and had a match point at 5-2 up in the deciding set. After Kontaveit missed her first serve, the lights briefly stopped working, as seen in the video below.
That seemed to distract Kontaveit, who was pegged back from match point to 5-5 in the third set before eventually winning 7-5. Having the lights malfunction at a professional tournament is unusual.
Yet, a few days later, another problem with the lights happened in Barbora Krejcikova's match against Marta Kostyuk. The umpire stopped play in the middle of a point after the disco lights suddenly began to play.
The WTA's Twitter page made light of the incident, and Iga Swiatek expressed amusement on social media. However, such disturbances should not happen at a WTA 250 tournament.
Organizers at the Tallinn Open were undoubtedly eager to get everything right to justify the tournament's inclusion on the WTA calendar again in 2023. However, its chances of doing so seem slim if Chinese tournaments return next year.
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