Victoria Azarenka was not happy with the power outage at the 2024 Miami Open during her match, which caused a stoppage as the electronic line calling system wasn’t working.
A very bizarre situation happened at the Miami Open during a match between Azarenka and Yulia Putintseva. The power went out, causing the electronic line-calling system to stop working, effectively stopping the match.
Due to the new technology that will be used Tour-wide on all surfaces starting next year, there are no line umpires on the court anymore. The power went out, so the match had to be stopped, as nobody could call the lines.
Neither player was particularly happy with that, especially Azarenka, who even left the court at one point. After the match, the Belarusian confirmed her frustration, even though she ultimately won the match. She admitted that patience is something she had to work on both on and off the court.
“Well, it’s definitely a frustration, and dealing with that, I’m not sure it’s the years of experience rather than being a parent helped me with that (smiling). It’s learning patience, is my biggest challenge, for sure, being a parent rather than being on the tennis court.”
The most annoying part for Azarenka was the uncertainty. There was no guarantee that the power would come back anytime soon, so she wasn’t aware when the match would resume. It could be 5 minutes or an hour, and that wasn’t very pleasant to deal with.
“So those situations are definitely frustrating, and as I said, it’s not necessarily of what happened is that when you are on the court you have no idea what we need to do, like, you sit on the court or you can go out of the court, are we going to continue to play, are we going to play with line umpires?”
“It was just very uncertain situation, and I think in the situation where you are kind of already at high nerves during the match, it’s probably adds to it. The frustration feeds that.”
After the match, Azarenka also admitted that her initial reaction to the situation wasn’t ideal, but she could reflect on it and learn from it.
“Well, my reaction was not the best. I thought it was — obviously in that moment where you’re playing a match, you’re like, okay, you need to stop, how long you need to stop for? I have no idea. It’s not an easy definitely thing to handle.”
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