"We didn’t know what was going to happen": Madrid Open tournament director opens up dealing with 'challenging' power outage on Monday

Madrid Open tournament director Feliciano Lopez has opened up about how they dealt with a major power breakdown. On Monday, as many as four countries on the continent, including Spain, Portugal and France, suffered a massive power failure.

The failure led to traffic jams in the Spanish capital, according to the BBC. In Portugal, it was reported that trains and traffic lights were affected due to the major failure. The whole episode left millions in the dark in different countries. Later in the day, Spani declared a state of emergency to address the developing situation. Power was restored in the vast majority of areas affected by the breakdown by Tuesday morning. The failure ultimately affected tennis events in various countries as well. In Spain, the ATP and WTA 1000 event — the Madrid Open — featured just three matches on Monday.

Tournament director Lopez has recently spoken to Sky Sports, where he stated how difficult it was to deal with the power breakdown. The 43-year-old, who reached as high as number 12 in ATP rankings during his playing days and retired from the sport back in 2023, stated that the biggest challenge on the day was not knowing what would happen in the few hours after the failure, as everything was uncertain.

“We survived the power outage on Monday, and it was a very challenging day,” he said. “But I have to say that the day after, when the power was back, everything was working perfectly in the venue, so we could go along with all the matches. But there was something very challenging, unexpected. We didn’t know what was going to happen in the next hours after this happened. So honestly, it was a very difficult moment, not only for us, but for everyone in the country, because it was a national problem, it was everywhere in the country.”