The Fed Cup is changing its name to honour tennis great Billie Jean King, the woman whose lifelong battle for equality and social justice laid the foundation for generations that followed.
The Billie Jean King Cup will become the first major global team competition to be named after a woman, the International Tennis Federation said Thursday.
“I’m still in shock,” the 76-year-old King said of the tribute. “It’s really a privilege, and it’s also a responsibility. It’s wild, it’s great, it’s wonderful.”
The rebranding follows earlier changes to bring prize money in line with the men’s Davis Cup and coincides with the 50th anniversary of King’s pioneering effort to launch a women’s pro tennis circuit.
“We feel it’s long overdue,” ITF president David Haggerty said. “All major team competitions, including Davis Cup, are named after men, and we think it’s really fitting that the women’s world cup of tennis would be named after someone as iconic as Billie Jean King, who changed the face of women’s sports.”
King and her peers, known as the “Original 9,” risked their careers to start the Virginia Slims tour. Their work led to the creation of the Women’s Tennis Association in 1973 as the organizing body for women’s professional tennis.
King’s early efforts led to the lucrative prize funds and multimillion-dollar endorsement deals enjoyed today by top players like Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka.
“Today, the players are living our dream, and we’re thrilled for them,” King said in an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the announcement. “Women’s tennis is the leader in women’s sports. We are also leaders in the fight for justice and equality.”
Osaka, who took stances against racial injustice en route to her U.S. Open victory, said the newly named tournament will “mean a lot more” now.
“For me, she’s truly an inspiration and she always texts me really nice messages,” the 22-year-old Osaka said. “It’s always very nice to see someone so respected just care so much about the game.”
King won 12 Grand Slam singles titles, including six at Wimbledon. But her most famous match came in 1973 when she beat 55-year-old Bobby Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 in the “Battle of the Sexes.” The match, considered to be a milestone in the promotion of women’s equality, was watched on TV by millions around the world.
King’s association with the Fed Cup goes back to its founding, when she was a member of the U.S. team that won the inaugural tournament in 1963 at Queen’s Club in London.
Then 19 years old, she recalled prodding her teammates: “This is history being made. We have to win it, so we always know we were the first. Come on! They said, Oh god, not you again. We know what the deal is.”
King, as a player and coach, won the Fed Cup trophy 10 times — a record for an individual. She was appointed as the competition’s first global ambassador in 2019.
Sixteen nations competed the first time, whereas 116 entered for 2020. Twelve teams play in the Finals.
“The goal is to continue that outreach and Billie as an iconic figure, who is so well known, can help us do that,” Haggerty said.
The Davis Cup — named for Dwight Davis, who played in the inaugural tournament in 1900 — has more nations and 18 spots in its Finals.
“I’d like to get more countries,” King said. “We have 116, the guys have 142. The cultures are different in a lot of countries. We’re going to have a lot of work ahead of us to break things down.”
The Billie Jean King Cup Finals are scheduled for April 13-18 in Budapest, Hungary. King said she “absolutely” will attend in April unless there are coronavirus roadblocks.
The 2020 Finals for both tournaments were scrapped this year because of the pandemic, although qualifying nations will maintain their places for the 2021 Finals.
King, the winner of 39 Grand Slam titles in singles, doubles and mixed doubles, said she’s “so fortunate” to be honoured by the ITF. She recalled the late tennis journalist Bud Collins proposing a Fed Cup name change years ago.
“He said it had a horrible name. I had heard then that they were talking about naming me, or Chris Evert, or maybe another player,” King said. “It never came to fruition through the years. I know how lucky I am and blessed. People have always championed me.”
During Thursday’s news conference, King said she was motivated to create change because no one likes to be discounted, whether it’s by gender, race or sexual orientation. King, a lesbian, said she hopes to see openly gay players in men’s professional tennis but they are reluctant because “other men give them such a bad time.”
“So we need to make it accepted and also celebrated when somebody is their authentic self,” she said. “We need to keep breaking down these barriers. I pray that someday the first male will speak up and come out and start change in the men’s side.”
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PARIS (AP) — French judicial authorities are investigating the disappearance of two Paralympic athletes from Congo who recently competed in the Paris Games, the prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Bobigny confirmed on Thursday.
Prosecutors opened the investigation on Sept. 7, after members of the athletes’ delegation warned authorities of their disappearance two days before.
Le Parisien newspaper reported that shot putter Mireille Nganga and Emmanuel Grace Mouambako, a visually impaired sprinter who was accompanied by a guide, went missing on Sept. 5, along with a third person.
The athletes’ suitcases were also gone but their passports remained with the Congolese delegation, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not allowed to speak publicly about the case.
The Paralympic Committee of the Democratic Republic of Congo did not respond to requests for information from The Associated Press.
Nganga — who recorded no mark in the seated javelin and shot put competitions — and Mouambako were Congo’s flag bearers at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games, organizers said.
An investigator gave the World Anti-Doping Agency a pass on its handling of the inflammatory case involving Chinese swimmers, but not without hammering away at the “curious” nature of WADA’s “silence” after examining Chinese actions that did not follow rules designed to safeguard global sports.
WADA on Thursday released the full decision from Eric Cottier, the Swiss investigator it appointed to analyze its handling of the case involving the 23 Chinese swimmers who remained eligible despite testing positive for performance enhancers in 2021.
In echoing wording from an interim report issued earlier this summer, Cottier said it was “reasonable” that WADA chose not to appeal the Chinese anti-doping agency’s explanation that the positives came from contamination.
“Taking into consideration the particularities of the case, (WADA) appears … to have acted in accordance with the rules it has itself laid out for anti-doping organizations,” Cottier wrote.
But peppered throughout his granular, 56-page analysis of the case was evidence and reminders of how WADA disregarded some of China’s violations of anti-doping protocols. Cottier concluded this happened more for the sake of expediency than to show favoritism toward the Chinese.
“In retrospect at least, the Agency’s silence is curious, in the face of a procedure that does not respect the fundamental rules, and its lack of reaction is surprising,” Cottier wrote of WADA’s lack of fealty to the world anti-doping code.
Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and one of WADA’s fiercest critics, latched onto this dynamic, saying Cottier’s information “clearly shows that China did not follow the rules, and that WADA management did nothing about it.”
One of the chief complaints over the handling of this case was that neither WADA nor the Chinese gave any public notice upon learning of the positive tests for the banned heart medication Temozolomide, known as TMZ.
The athletes also were largely kept in the dark and the burden to prove their innocence was taken up by Chinese authorities, not the athletes themselves, which runs counter to what the rulebook demands.
Despite the criticisms, WADA generally welcomed the report.
“Above all, (Cottier) reiterated that WADA showed no bias towards China and that its decision not to appeal the cases was reasonable based on the evidence,” WADA director general Olivier Niggli said. “There are however certainly lessons to be learned by WADA and others from this situation.”
Tygart said “this report validates our concerns and only raises new questions that must be answered.”
Cottier expanded on doubts WADA’s own chief scientist, Olivier Rabin, had expressed over the Chinese contamination theory — snippets of which were introduced in the interim report. Rabin was wary of the idea that “a few micrograms” of TMZ found in the kitchen at the hotel where the swimmers stayed could be enough to cause the group contamination.
“Since he was not in a position to exclude the scenario of contamination with solid evidence, he saw no other solution than to accept it, even if he continued to have doubts about the reality of contamination as described by the Chinese authorities,” Cottier wrote.
Though recommendations for changes had been expected in the report, Cottier made none, instead referring to several comments he’d made earlier in the report.
Key among them were his misgivings that a case this big was largely handled in private — a breach of custom, if not the rules themselves — both while China was investigating and after the file had been forwarded to WADA. Not until the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD reported on the positives were any details revealed.
“At the very least, the extraordinary nature of the case (23 swimmers, including top-class athletes, 28 positive tests out of 60 for a banned substance of therapeutic origin, etc.), could have led to coordinated and concerted reflection within the Agency, culminating in a formal and clearly expressed decision to take no action,” the report said.
WADA’s executive committee established a working group to address two more of Cottier’s criticisms — the first involving what he said was essentially WADA’s sloppy recordkeeping and lack of formal protocol, especially in cases this complex; and the second a need to better flesh out rules for complex cases involving group contamination.
The French league’s legal commission has ordered Paris Saint-Germain to pay Kylian Mbappé the 55 million euros ($61 million) in unpaid wages that he claims he’s entitled to, the league said Thursday.
The league confirmed the decision to The Associated Press without more details, a day after the France superstar rejected a mediation offer by the commission in his dispute with his former club.
