The exclusion of N. Djokovic and N. Vikhlyantseva from the Australian Open 2022
The Djokovic & Vikhlyantseva cases involved a world renowned sportsman, ranked no. 1 in the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) rankings and a Russian tennis player, former world no. 54 in the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) rankings. Both players were eligible for the Australia Open (AO) 2022 Tournament or "the happy slam" which along with the French Open, the Wimbledon and the US Open, belongs to the Grand Slam (GS) tournaments - the world's four most important and prestigious annual professional tennis events. While the Grand Slam tournaments are overseen by the International Tennis Federation (ITF), it is the ATP and WTA that award ranking points based on players’ performances. These GS events offer the most ranking points, prize money and public and media attention. It’s worth mentioning that the winners of the AO 2022 will be awarded a total prize money of approximately USD $2,075,000. It goes without saying that the participation and performance in the GSs are of a major significance for every professional on tour. Thus, the governing sporting bodies must ensure that the outcome of these events are solely based on the athletes' merits.
In December 2021, Ms Vikhlyantseva, vaccinated with the Russian-made Sputnik V, announced that she would skip the AO 2022 due to the strict visa COVID-19 restrictions of the Australian Government. These border restrictions adopted by Australia that essentially left it isolated from the rest of the world, did not recognise the Sputnik V vaccine at that point in time as a vaccine that satisfied the state's visa entry requirements. A few days later, in January 2022, Mr Djokovic who was not vaccinated at all, was deported via a mandate by the Australian immigration minister citing "health and good order grounds, on the basis that it was in the public interest to do so".
The interference of the Australian government with the organisation of the Australian Open
As far as the Australian government is concerned, apart from the common bureaucratic doctrine "one-size-fits-all" and from the state self-assumed exclusive privilege to exercise violence, one could not reasonably justify the ban of the two athletes from entering or remaining in Australia.
- On a preliminary level, both sportspersons had been invited by an official Australian entity and there was no doubt that they could find a place of residence during their stay. That should be sufficient for those advocating in favour of the entry-visas.
- On the issue of the so-called "health grounds", such reasoning might be acceptable to prevent the import and transmission of a contagious virus into Australia. However, both athletes were healthy by all definition at their supposed entry date. Even if we assume that they had insufficient antibodies to be protected by the virus during their stay, they were only risking being infected within Australia, rather than transmitting the virus into Australia. Thus, this risk solely concerns their self-ownership and would have absolutely no effect on the host city given that they themselves would also be submitted to the strict sanitary restrictions locally enforced back in 2020.
- The supposed argument that in case of infection these two athletes would bear down on the Australian health system would be, indeed, a valid argument for a statist regime. Nevertheless, such an argument would expose the absurdity of a governmental policy which, amid a pandemic, allowed the presence of more than 300 competitors and members of their training teams, but excluded two athletes out of fear of them causing the collapse of the national health system.
- The vague "good order" and "public interest" grounds are those regularly invoked by the governments when an authoritative measure is taken, while no serious argumentation can support it. More often than not, they aim at manipulating the fear of the government's subjects for their life, safety and property. But in this case, they merely aimed at satisfying the need of the oppressed Australians to feel that nobody was exempted from their preposterous suffering of loss of liberty.
- After all, as the Australian minister himself admitted, although Mr Djokovic was a “negligible risk to those around him”, his stay might “lead to an increase in anti-vaccination sentiment” and even “civil unrest”! In effect, Mr Djokovic was deported because of his thoughts and beliefs as these were assessed by the Australian government.
The distortion of the sports competition by the ITF
As far as the sports movement is concerned, the ITF failed to ensure the integrity of the game and the safety of its athletes. This constitutes a serious drawback from the accepted self-regulation of the international professional sports bodies despite being one of the early challengers of the state authority.
- Indeed, the sports movement has long developed a rather successful mentality of independence establishing a net of private self-enforced judicial mechanisms. The most prestigious of them is the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Although, its over-centralised structure and the binding submission of the disputes by the athletes (who have no other alternative but to drop professional sports) qualifies CAS a quasi state-institution, it has nevertheless achieved to hopefully blaze a trail to a more open and voluntary adjudication of sports disputes and to protect both the "fair play" and the sports financial competition from the state interference. To this end, the sports governing bodies and the arbitral tribunals applying strict liability have occasionally excluded not only individual athletes and national sports federations, but even a great number of states due to their government’s policies which e.g. discriminated against certain group of people and athletes, interfered with sports governance or did not respect the international peace.
- Unfortunately, in the Djokovic & Vikhlyantseva cases the international sports movement uncomplainingly allowed a government to arbitrarily interfere with the eligibility of professional sportspersons for a highly competitive and lucrative sports event. This state interference critically tainted the competition by forcing professional athletes either to inject a drug regardless of whether they needed it to, or to miss the competition, jeopardising their professional goals. It’s worth mentioning that few days after Ms. Vikhlyantseva’s withdrawal, the Australian government approved the Sputnik V vaccine.
- As explained above, in cases of encroachment on sports competition the competent sports authorities apply strict liability. In a bid to ensure fairness and equal treatment, strict liability should apply in every case, regardless of whether the liability is attributed to physical persons or to sports bodies.
ITF’s strict liability
*A similar to Djokovic case involved Ms Renata Voracova
Comments
Post a Comment