A poster hanging on the D.C. Open website reveals Frances Tiafoe — a competitor within the discipline from close by Hyattsville, Maryland — flanked by different males comparable to Andy Murray and Taylor Fritz and ladies comparable to Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula.
It is a straightforward visualization of an advanced change to a match that started Monday and has been round for males since 1969, added girls through a simultaneous however lower-tier and less-promoted occasion in 2009 and now could be taking an additional step by touting itself as the primary mixed ATP-WTA 500 occasion. That is 2 ranges beneath Grand Slams and one degree beneath Masters 1000s and was completed by elevating the ladies’s portion by way of the lease of what had been a hard-court tourney in San Jose, California, performed throughout the identical week.
While ostensibly that places the women and men on equal footing within the District — the place gamers each can be attempting to win a trophy and to organize for the U.S. Open, the 12 months’s final Grand Slam match — it nonetheless will not be equal all the way in which round.
Most notably: The males’s champion receives a test for $353,445; the ladies’s champion earns $120,150. That will not be an anomaly. There are different stops on the skilled tennis excursions that embody feminine and male gamers however don’t pay them evenly.
“Our main goal is to work toward equal prize money. That is what we want on the WTA side and what we think is fair. Especially at the combined events, we don’t want to see a discrepancy there. We want to see that we’re earning the same at the same event,” stated Pegula, an American who’s No. 3 within the rankings and seeded No. 1 in Washington and a member of the ladies’s tour’s participant council. “The fans are coming to watch both of us, and we should be making the same.”
All 4 Grand Slam tournaments supply equal prize cash throughout the board, one thing the U.S. Open began doing 50 years in the past and others as lately as 2007. That received’t occur on the D.C. Open till 2027 as a part of a wider plan the WTA lately introduced to get equal paychecks at sure occasions by that 12 months and at others by 2033.
“That will give everyone a chance to hopefully get revenues to grow to be able to afford it,” stated Mark Ein, who has been the match chairman since 2019 and is a part of the group that lately purchased the NFL’s Washington Commanders from Dan Snyder.
“When we took over the tournament, one of my top goals was to secure a women’s event at an equal level as our men’s,” Ein stated. “One of the things I love about tennis is it’s really the only sport where athletes of both genders compete on the same playing surface at the same time.”
There are different discrepancies between the boys’s and ladies’s brackets in Washington.
The males’s discipline is 48 gamers; the ladies’s is 28. The rankings factors accessible are practically the identical, however the males’s champion will get 500, the ladies’s 470.
Like Pegula, three-time main champion Murray, who’s seeded fifteenth within the District, stated that every one gamers “at the same event, on the same courts,” ought to be vying for a similar payouts.
“But I think for it ever to become like truly equal, the WTA and the ATP are actually going to have to come together and work as one before that’s the case, because I don’t think it’s that straightforward just now that both tours have different sponsors, different TV deals and all of that stuff, too,” Murray stated. “There is a few things that still need to change, but I feel like things are going in the right direction, like with the move to this event becoming a 500 for both. Can obviously still get better.”
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