Elena Rybakina's travel record on the WTA Tour this season has backed up Reilly Opelka's concerns over players' carbon footprints as they are forced to fly between continents for tournaments. For professional tennis players at the top levels of the
ATP and WTA Tours, their jobs require a lot of travel as they play at tournaments all over the world. In doing so, they contribute to large amounts of carbon emissions which has a big environmental impact.
An example of this was made clear when World No. 5 Rybakina's air miles for the 2023 season were revealed. The Kazakhstani No. 1 has participated in 18 WTA Tour-level events so far this year, held across Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, and North America. This has amounted to 68,836 km of air travel.
Opelka calls on ATP and WTA to change schedule to reduce carbon footprint
This amount did not even include the player's training-related travel or travel for personal reasons. Rybakina began the season at the Adelaide International tournaments ahead of the Australian Open in January. She then traveled to the UAE for two tournaments before flying to the USA for the Indian Wells and Miami Open, before going back to Kazakhstan for the Billie Jean King Cup qualifiers.
This level of international travel is something that many, if not all, top-ranked players have had to do in order to play at tournaments throughout the year. As a result, American player Reilly Opelka recently called out the ATP's scheduling.
The 26-year-old was condemning the ATP Carbon Tracker (which allows players to track their air miles in a bid to cut them down) as "pr and optics" that made no actually meaningful change.
"Why not adjust the schedule to avoid players flying with a coach and physio overseas every other week? Planting trees for one person, doesn't offset anything. But it's great optics. If they really cared about carbon footprint, they would look at the schedule. Other it's just PR and optics.
"If sustainability was such a concern for the ATP why does our schedule say otherwise? Can drinking from a metal water bottle really offset flying from australia to south america, to usa, to europe, back to us, to asia, back to europe in 10 months?" he wrote on social media.
