I will address COVID theft ongoing from 2020-2024 here, but that is not my main point as hopefully this thing is gone and will never happen again.
However it's worth saying that we've been in sort of ilegal period and that the ilegal period will finally end once Indian Wells and Miami 2024 are completed and no one is banned from playing.
It started in March 2020 when they froze rankings during Djokovic's #1 reign during lockdown period. They stole many weeks from him in that near 5-month period.
It was highly immoral. Why freeze rankings simply because there are no tournaments? The situation in itself is no different that e.g. December when there's also no play, yet rankings keep going.
ATP rankings are "best in the last 52" weeks and it should have been kept that way, tournaments or no tournaments. Players should have lost pts as the time progressed and the guy with most pts in the last 52 weeks is the #1. If everyone lose points, then
there is no number 1. Simple.
(This debate has been addressed several times before in different capacity, e.g. what if a player who secured year end #1 would suddenly die, do you remove him from the rankings and rob him of his weeks, year end and others achievements? My position is
always, no. You don't have to play to be #1, you don't have to even be alive. You just have to have most pts in the last 52 weeks attached to your name.)
So COVID freeze of the rankings was a criminal act in a way. I understand the problems with tournaments not being held, but if needed for entry purposes, they could have used last pre-COVID rankings as a supplement to ongoing "best of 52 weeks" rankings
and not this mess with freezing then turning it into best od 104 weeks and so on.
This mess ended sometime in cca 2022 (I think bizarrely, Federer carried parts of his 2019 Wimbledon pts all the way into 2022 season).
But then another mess occurred. Countries such as USA and Australia interfering in goat chase, not honouring their own international sporting events and not providing exceptions for Djokovic, world class athlete.
At the time, I wrote and I'll repeat, blackman Jesse Owens didn't even have US passport, yet Nazi Germany welcomed him on the basis of some Olympic pass, and they treated it as an official document to let him into Germany.
Why? Because they were hosts of international sporting event and it's unthinkable to prevent foreign athletes from coming in order to boost chances of home players or some others. Or even advance your politics or ideology. Nazis supremacists could have
rejected Blackman, but they didn't.
Olympic charter was more important than race ideology for them. Not even Nazis would resort to putting politics over sports.
Yet Biden did exactly that, he put COVID agenda over sport.
For a mental gymnastics imagine if Phelps was banned from entering China ahead of 2008 Olympics on some political grounds?
The situation is unfathomable and will stay remembered forever as a shame to Australia and America.
Many in the world stage questioned should such ITF championships be held in those countries.
And then even more bizarrely, for the reasons also out of Djokovic's control and not related to COVID hoax, and I will admit, this was not unfair to him personally, but to Russians and Belarusians, so Djokovic isn't wronged here, but it still ended up
insane at his disadvantage, he got no pts for his 2022 Wimbledon.
A messy period.
This year he's been still banned by Biden in first half of the year, so he was forced to skip Indian Wells and Miami, losing a shot at 2000 pts which might cost him year-end #1 as well.
But he was definitely robbed of 2021, I mean we are talking about potential 8000 pts plus Wimbledon's 2000 pts. Alcaraz's year end lead was cca 2000 pts.
We'll see about this year.
The ilegal period ends in April 2024, but other than almost certain year end #1 in 2022, Djokovic probably lost 50 or maybe up to 100 weeks.
Absurd.
Never again should this travesty occur.
And now my main point.
Grand Slam is the ultimate achievement. Such season ranks among the greatest seasons in all of sporting history, let alone tennis, but ATP rankings could have that person as #2 or worse? Haha.
And what's worse, ATP invented their ATP player of the year award in 1975, to correct "faulty" rankings of that year, but they've de facto abolished the award since 2000, as they award it automatically to the guy who gets computer #1 rankings. So the
award exists, but not really.
I know ITF will get it properly as they're a committee. So was ATP Player of the Year, a committee.
But should all be very simple to address even for computer rankings. Pts earned from winning 4 grand slam titles should outweigh someone else's near perfect season.
So a player could have near perfect season, reach 4 slam finals, win 9 ATP 1000s, win YEC and another ATP 500s, five? That's cca 17800 pts. But if there's another guy with Grand Slam, then he's ahead.
So a Grand Slam should be say 18000 pts to top this guy with 17800 pts, meaning 4500 pts per slam, assuming current system doesn't change a bit. The only change needed is for the slam wins to go up from 2000 to 4500.
So that's how it should be as it protects the integrity and logic of the game. Grand Slam winner should get the computer #1 as a rule.
Players with 3 slams doesn't have to have #1 guaranteed, but the one with 4, has to be guaranteed.
It would also render unnecessary all those YEC requirements that slam winners must be in top 20 in order to qualify etc.
With 4500 pts you're in top 20 anyway.
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