Saudi Arabia’s first WTA Tour Finals: Tennis spectacle collides with everyday reality in Riyadh

RIYADH — On an otherwise unremarkable evening in May 2018, dozens of cars approached the Al-Hathloul household in Riyadh. Security officers got out the cars, broke down the door and took Loujain Al-Hathloul into custody.

Al-Hathloul, a prominent women’s rights advocate in Saudi Arabia, had led the campaign for the right for women to drive in the kingdom. When it was announced that women would be permitted to hold driving licenses in 2018, the Saudi authorities told Al-Hathloul not to comment nor push for more change, an order which she respected. In March 2018, she was kidnapped from the United Arab Emirates by the same state forces and placed under a travel ban. Then she was arrested on that May evening and, according to family members, subjected to electric shocks, whippings, and sexual harassment while imprisoned. They say that Al-Hathloul, 28 at the time, was tortured by the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s right-hand man Saud al-Qahtani. Neither Al-Qahtani nor the Saudi authorities have commented on these claims.

Al-Hathloul’s detainment was part of 11 women protestors being arrested on account of “coordinated activity to undermine the security, stability and social peace of the kingdom,” according to the Saudi Arabian public prosecution office.

Al-Hathloul learned of that travel ban when trying to go and visit her sister Lina with her parents in April 2018. Lina had left Saudi Arabia to move to Brussels in 2011, initially to study, and then had last been back in December 2017. That remains the last time she has been home, or has seen any of her family members who still live in Riyadh.

Now Lina wakes up each morning to check they are safe and communicates with them on FaceTime. Loujain was released from prison in February 2021 under strict conditions, including a travel ban. After it expired, two years and 10 months after her release, she was told that the ban had in fact been made permanent.

“My family lives under constant fear of arrest,” said Lina, in a phone interview from Brussels where she is the head of monitoring and advocacy at the NGO ALQST for Human Rights. “I was on a video call with them recently and they were having dinner. And at one point there was a sound — something broke in the fridge or something. And I saw their frightened faces, how scared they were. It was really heartbreaking for me to see.

“This is the routine now in Saudi Arabia. People just living in fear constantly.”

As Lina discussed her sister’s arrest, the city in which she was taken was preparing for day four of the WTA Tour Finals, the marquee tournament in women’s tennis. The top eight singles players in the world, including Aryna Sabalenka — the world No. 1 — Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff, compete in the season-ending event, playing for a prize pool of more than $15million (£11.6m) — the largest in women’s tennis history. Gauff ultimately lifted the trophy by beating Zheng Qinwen in the final Saturday November 9, winning over $4.8m (£3.7m) in the process.

At the tournament media day, the players — who were involved in discussions about moving the event to Riyadh — spoke of the excellent facilities and conditions, and emphasized the benefits of opening up tennis in the kingdom for young women and girls.

They spoke of how humbling it was to see these youngsters, who wouldn’t have been allowed to play tennis not long ago, so thrilled to now be participating with the best women players in the world at coaching events and clinics. The players largely swerved questions on human rights and the LGBTQ+ community; only world No. 3 Gauff directly expressed reservations about hosting the event in the kingdom.

“If I felt uncomfortable or felt like nothing’s happening, then maybe I probably wouldn’t come back.

“I don’t live here, so I can only trust what people are telling me that live here,” she said.

In a statement sent to The Athletic, the WTA said: “We believe it is the right thing to open up new opportunities for women to play professional tennis in different countries, and to give audiences in those countries the opportunity to watch the world’s best players.”

Thousands of political prisoners are under arrest in Saudi Arabia for speaking out against the absolute monarchy and government. Last month, Amnesty International said that Manahel al-Otaibi, a Saudi fitness instructor and influencer, who was jailed in January for promoting women’s rights on social media, was stabbed in the face while in prison.

Human rights groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have criticized Saudi Arabia’s record on freedom of expression, including the criminalization of same-sex relationships and the ‘Personal Status Law,’ which requires women to obtain a male guardian’s permission to marry. Freedom House ranks Saudi Arabia as being one of the worst countries in the world when it comes to free speech, with a score of 8/100 in this year’s Freedom of the World report. The country is ranked 126th out of 146 nations included in the 2024 Global Gender Gap index.

In Brussels, Loujain al-Hathoul’s sister cannot divide the temporary spectacle of the Tour Finals from everyday reality.

“The same people who allow women to play tennis are also torturing the activists,” she said.

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The WTA Tour and Saudi Tennis Federation (STF) announced the three-year deal to host the Tour Finals in April. The deal was particularly controversial because the founding principles of the WTA were based on equal opportunity.

Founding member Billie Jean King, who is openly gay, supported the deal based on the argument that only through engaging with countries like Saudi Arabia can tennis help to effect change. She did not attend the inaugural event in Riyadh.

Martina Navratilova, another tennis legend who is openly gay, and Chris Evert made the opposite argument: “We oppose the awarding of the tour’s crown jewel tournament to Riyadh. The WTA’s values sit in stark contrast to those of the proposed host,” they wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post in January.

Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, responded on X that by trying to keep the WTA Finals from going to Saudi Arabia, the stars had turned their back on women they had inspired.

“We lost our moral high ground when the women decided to go there,” Navratilova told the New York Times earlier this month. Another source who works in tennis, who asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships, told The Athletic that: “I think we all understand that running a global tour takes a lot of money and so it was hard to turn this down. What’s hard for liberal fans, gay fans, fans who have concern around going to Riyadh is this feeling of: ‘Are we abandoning those original benchmarks that really made the WTA so unique and so special?’”

Speaking to other members of the LGBTQ+ community in tennis, The Athletic has heard similar arguments to those made by Navratilova and Evert — who are typically regulars at the Finals but have been conspicuous by their absence in Saudi Arabia. “It seems to me that it’s at odds with the whole legacy of the WTA,” said one person involved in women’s tennis, who requested anonymity to protect relationships.

“It feels like they’re selling out, and to so many within the sport. I’ve spoken to quite a few former women’s players, and some men. Would I personally feel comfortable about going there? I’d have to think long and hard about it.”

Alison Van Uytvanck, the former world No. 37 and an openly gay player, told The Athletic in an interview published this week that she would have played the event, pointing out that there are other WTA tournaments played in places with similar laws on same-sex relationships, like Qatar and Abu Dhabi. World No. 9 Daria Kasatkina, who played one match at the event as an alternate, told BBC Sport that she had received “guarantees” over safety after previously expressing wariness at the prospect of tournaments in Saudi Arabia.

The WTA has defended the decision to stage the event in Riyadh. WTA chief executive Portia Archer said at the media day that some host nations do not share values with the organization, but then clarified that she had “misspoke”:

“My intention was to really say that we respect the values, even if they differ from other countries that we find ourselves in and compete in.”

In the statement sent to The Athletic, the WTA said: “As a global sport, with players from almost 90 nations, we go to many countries around the world that reflect different cultures, and we respect those local customs.

“The WTA has had a presence in the Middle East for many years and we have never had any issues with freedom of expression.”

The WTA has previously chosen to withhold events from certain countries. Russia has not hosted a WTA tournament since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

It stopped holding events in China for nearly two years after the disappearance of women’s player Peng Shuai in 2021. Shuai accused Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier of China, of sexual assault in social media posts that quickly disappeared, prompting the WTA to withdraw tournaments from the country in boycott. Zhang Gaoli denied the claims.

The WTA ended that boycott 16 months later, and Shuai described the situation as a “misunderstanding” in an interview with French newspaper L’Equipe, conducted in the presence of a Chinese Olympic official.

“The situation has shown no sign of changing. We have concluded we will never fully secure those goals, and it will be our players and tournaments who ultimately will be paying an extraordinary price for their sacrifices,” said a WTA press release last April. The boycott prompted China to terminate its 10-year deal to host the Tour Finals, which in part led to the event being staged in Saudi Arabia.

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In the U.S. State Department’s most recent annual report on human rights practices for Saudi Arabia, the very first line in the executive summary reads: “There were no significant changes to the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia during the year.” It then lists what it calls credible reports of various human rights violations, including “arbitrary or unlawful killings… arbitrary arrest and detention… crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons.”

Gauff and fellow American Jessica Pegula said they had been heavily involved in discussions about hosting the Finals in Saudi Arabia and were convinced that there would be sufficient social good through things like coaching clinics for local girls, which the players visited and took part in during the tournament. Some players, according to Romain Rosenberg, deputy executive director of the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA), felt that the tournament did not make enough of the initiatives to improve tennis provision in the kingdom at the pre-event dinner.

Judy Murray, a well-respected coach and the mother of Grand Slam champions and former world No 1s Andy and Jamie, first agreed to hold tennis clinics for girls in Saudi Arabia in 2022. Ahead of the 2024 WTA Tour Finals, Murray told The Athletic of her passion for the project and how much she too believes in engagement being the only way to bring about change. “I saw it as a massive opportunity for tennis to be a catalyst for women’s sport, for change, to open a sport up for the first time,” Murray said of accepting the role to help popularize tennis in Saudi Arabia — a position Amnesty International called “a sportswashing role” two years ago.

In tennis terms, things are changing for the better in Saudi Arabia. According to the Saudi Tennis Federation, the country boasts three high-performance academies and since the 2019 Diriyah Tennis Cup, an exhibition event that marked Saudi’s first serious move into tennis, the number of registered players has risen by 46 percent to 2,300, while the number of tennis clubs in Saudi Arabia has risen to 177, an increase of nearly 150 percent.

There are barely any public courts in the country but more are being built, and children get access to tennis through a widespread schools programme. In 2023, the “Tennis for All” programme was integrated into the physical education curriculum at 90 schools (for around 29,000 children) through a partnership with the Ministry of Education, and plans are underway to expand to 200 schools within the next year. Saudi Arabia hopes to engage one million people in tennis by 2030. The figure includes off-court administration and infrastructure as well as direct participation.

During an ITF junior event held at the Mahd sports academy in Riyadh alongside the WTA Tour Finals, STF president Arij Mutabagani expressed the desire to make tennis the nation’s most popular sport.

Saudi Arabia and tennis are becoming increasingly intertwined, with the country pushing to host a Masters 1000 event, the level of tournament one rung below the Grand Slams. This push has stalled recently, but the ATP and WTA have existing strategic partnerships with the Kingdom’s PIF, which sponsors both sets of rankings and whose logo can be seen at tournaments throughout the year. The proposal for a Masters 1000 event would commit $1bn (nearly £774m) of investment inclusive of those existing partnerships; the already-signed deals, including the one to host the Tour Finals, amount to several hundred million dollars. This is all part of Saudi Arabia’s recent string of investments in sports (most prominently football and golf) — to shift its image and economy from one built largely around petroleum into that of a modern society with broad cultural and economic interests that is open to the world.

Human rights experts and certain people from within the country, including Lina al-Hathloul, say that the argument for change via engagement does not stand up to scrutiny.

“That argument is horses*** and I’m happy to go on record calling it that,” says Nicholas McGeechan, the founding co-director of human rights advocacy organisation, FairSquare. “The entire purpose of these tournaments and ventures if you’re someone like MBS (Bin Salman) is not to start these conversations (about human rights) but to shut them down.

“There’s a whole architecture around players not to say anything — this is a huge cash cow and nobody wants to rock the boat. I really don’t buy that line at all, I think it’s a really insidious thing that people push.”

At the 2023 WTA Tour Finals in Cancun, players received a series of media talking points, including suggested responses to questions about playing in Saudi Arabia, as reported by The Athletic. The responses included: “I’m happy to play wherever the WTA Finals is hosted, it’s a prestigious event.” In the same year, U.S. Senate officials probing the deal between the PGA Tour and the PIF found that the PIF added a non-disparagement clause to the agreement which forbade the PGA Tour from criticizing Saudi Arabia, as reported by the Guardian.

The Saudi government and PIF declined to comment on this argument in 2023. At this year’s Tour Finals, Archer insisted in a news conference that the players in Riyadh on this occasion were not briefed on what to say about the country (a claim supported by sources close to some of the players involved).

McGeechan analogizes the example of a mutual silence between the PGA and PIF to what he calls the “hideous social contract” between MBS and the Saudi people.

“People who complain about how things are done in Saudi get decades-long jail sentences,” McGeechan says.

“He presents himself as a sort of benefactor but there are very strict terms to that, which is: ‘Don’t criticize anything I do. It’s the rights I allow you as women. It’s not the rights that you have’.” Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, meaning that laws can be changed at Bin Salman’s behest at any time.

“I’m so happy about Saudi women being able to play tennis,” Lina al-Hathoul says. “But what we have to focus on is the repression.

“When the WTA go to Saudi, I would say they should adopt a political prisoner’s case and take it on and say ‘OK, we’re going, but we are also advocating for them. And Manahel al-Otaibi (the jailed fitness instructor) is the closest case you could have to sports. Say, ‘We are happy to be in Saudi. We’re happy that Saudi women are to now play tennis. But what about Manahel al-Otaibi?’”

When Loujain al-Hathloul was arrested in 2018, her charges explicitly mentioned her human rights work. She says she was blindfolded, thrown into the boot of a car and taken to a detention centre which she has called a “palace of terror”. She was tried under legislation in the specialised criminal court (SCC), which Amnesty International has described as “a weapon to systematically silence dissent”.

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s judiciary system does not condone, promote, or allow the use of torture. Anyone, whether male or female, being investigated is going through the standard judiciary process led by the public prosecution while being held for questioning, which does not in any way rely on torture either physical, sexual, or psychological,” a Saudi official told CNN in November 2019 in response to a Human Rights Watch report on the alleged abuse of Loujain and other women campaigners for the right to drive who had been detained.

Speaking to media is completely out of the question for Loujain now, as it is for any dissenting voices in Saudi Arabia.

“I wouldn’t put any words in her mouth because she cannot speak,” Lina says.

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At the King Saud University Indoor Stadium, the opening day of the WTA Finals is largely successful, with a decent crowd, made up largely of Chinese supporters to see Zheng lose to world No. 1 Sabalenka. Though not briefed on how to discuss the event, Archer said in a news conference that players were briefed on appropriate clothing.

The crowd thins out for the second singles match between Jasmine Paolini and Elena Rybakina and the following day there are swathes of empty seats. Despite tickets going for as little as 32.50 Riyals ($8.66, £6.66), the 5,000-capacity venue is never more than about 10 percent full and so the focus falls on the sense of hosting one of the WTA’s blue-riband events in a largely empty arena.

The WTA and the players insist that they are confident that over time interest in the event will build in Saudi Arabia and that these things take time (the Finals will also be held in Riyadh in 2025 and 2026). The Monday was a bit fuller, with the venue almost getting to halfway full, while on Wednesday it picked up again to a decent size, with a good number of women in the crowd. By Friday and Saturday, crowds picked up further, with Zheng, Gauff, and Swiatek all complimenting the noise of the crowd and their expression of support for players. In tennis terms, after a thrilling final in which Gauff beat Zheng in a final-set tiebreak in front of a lively crowd, you could ultimately argue that this was one of the most successful WTA Finals in years. The STF said 21,000 people attended across the week — eight days of full capacity crowds would have seen around 40,000. After some logistical issues early on and an internal sense of a lack of urgency from organizers, especially compared to previous events like men’s boxing and the recent ‘Six Kings Slam,’ things were said to really improve and run smoothly.

Saudi Arabia is currently the only bidder for the 2034 men’s FIFA World Cup, but in 2023, FIFA’s proposal of the kingdom as a sponsor for the women’s World Cup of that year received significant backlash, including from current USWNT coach Emma Hayes.

In Brussels, Lina al-Hathoul is describing more political prisoners in the country. Human rights activist Salma al-Shehab was sentenced to 27 years in prison for “terrorist offences”. In June 2023, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared Al-Shehab’s detention arbitrary and called for her immediate release. Al-Shehab has reportedly been subjected to solitary confinement and verbal abuse on the basis of her religion while in prison. She has also been denied access to a lawyer and family visits.

Saudi Arabian authorities and the PIF declined to comment on Al-Shehab’s case.

Al-Hathloul explains that the unpredictability of arrests and harsh sentences constitute much of her family’s fear. “It’s this thing of never knowing what the red lines are,” she says.

Some citizens support Bin Salman, who is seen as a great moderniser and someone who is promoting Saudi interests in the face of an inhospitable western world. There is a belief among some that an ignorance from many westerners towards Saudi leads to misconceptions of the nature of life in the country. This argument points to how alive the country feels now, and how different it is to a few years ago — the fact that women don’t have to wear traditional dress when out in public anymore.

Human rights campaigners reject that argument when it comes to freedom of speech. “This is not western or eastern, northern or southern, these are human rights,” says Sarah Leah Whitson from Democracy for the Arab World Now.

“Rights that have been enshrined in international treaties ratified by most countries in the world — including the universal declaration of human rights. The notion that freedom from torture is a western concept is absurd and ridiculous.”

For the LGBTQ+ community in Saudi Arabia, freedom means keeping sexuality private — both for fear of punishment by the authorities but also to avoid being shunned socially. There are deeply-held religious and cultural views that mean many, according to those who have lived in the country, find the idea of homosexuality repulsive. Others said things are not so extreme, and one western visitor to the Kingdom said that while in Saudi he went to a party with many members of the LGBTQ+ community where alcohol, which is illegal, was flowing.

Three years ago, The Athletic reported on allegations of gay men in Saudi Arabia being subjected to cure therapy, including one man alleging that he was made to vomit while watching gay pornography, to try and alter their sexuality. The report wrote that: “A level of societal shunning left one interviewee concluding that homosexuality in Saudi Arabia means ‘misery, isolation or, worse, death.’ The Athletic has been told of other medical sites where cure therapy is alleged to take place, including allegations that trans women have been forced to take male hormones against their will and threats of electric shock therapy.”

In its statement to The Athletic, the WTA said that it consulted a wide range of views before deciding to host the Tour Finals in Riyadh: “We recognize that Saudi Arabia’s investment in sport is a subject that provokes strong views.

“As part of our decision-making process, we engaged widely with people and organizations with a range of different views.”

Saudi Arabian authorities and the PIF declined to comment on any of the allegations in this story when put to them by The Athletic.

In Brussels, Lina al-Hathoul explains the limits of delivering a sporting spectacle without directly engaging with the system that helps to fund and stage it.

“If you go there, you are up to actively contributing to covering up the torture of women were in prison. You are actively contributing to Saudi women getting arrested for not wearing an abaya. How I feel is that I’ve screamed enough for people to know what is happening in the country.

“I think that no one can say that they don’t know.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton)