PARIS – With only one week separating the end of one and the start of the other, the Tour de France and the French Open were shaping up as a double bill of sports entertainment, with masked but nevertheless present crowds, that would bear out President Emmanuel Macron’s arguments that the country can live with the coronavirus.
The virus, however, had different ideas.
Whereas cycling’s three-week spotlight event reached Paris last Sunday having pulled off the coup of getting through the country’s worsening epidemic without any positives tests for COVID-19 among its 176 riders, the French Open isn’t proving so lucky with its timing.
Play is still scheduled to start Sunday, but as infections soar across France, organizers’ plans to have thousands of spectators there each day to cheer for Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams and others have been drastically scaled back to allow just 1,000 daily visitors.
“Not the ideal situation. Nobody likes to play with these conditions, no?” Nadal, the record-setting 12-time French Open champion said Friday about having so few spectators at Roland Garros. “Everybody wants to come back to the normal situation. But before that, we need to fix the most important thing, and that is the worldwide health that today is still under big problems.”