Quietly and without any great fanfare, tennis has just taken a major step in confronting one of its dirtiest secrets: the all-too-common abuse or exploitation of players, especially young female players, by coaches or other “support” staff.
The latest allegation centres on Stefano Vukov, who works with the 2022 Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina. A 37-year-old Croatian, Vukov was denied a credential for January’s Australian Open on the basis of a “provisional suspension” for allegedly breaking the WTA’s code of conduct.
On Tuesday night, that suspension was confirmed in a WTA email. The ban is understood to relate to instances of verbal and mental abuse towards Rybakina, and to last for a year.
Vukov denies any wrongdoing, and has the right to appeal. He also appears to have the support of Rybakina, who said during January’s United Cup that he had “never mistreated” her.
But the very fact that the WTA has intervened is a rarity indeed. Instances of the tour excluding team members in an attempt to protect players are almost unheard of. Previous examples have been largely confined to overbearing parents such as Damir Dokic and Jim Pierce.
While not completely unprecedented, you have to go back a long way to find a coach receiving a ban for his or her treatment of players (as opposed to betting or corruption offences, which does occasionally happen at the lower levels of the game).
In the mid-2000s, the WTA enacted a life ban on Joe Giuliano. A former player who once moved in the same social circles as Vitas Gerulaitis and John McEnroe, Giuliano ceased to be a part of the tennis scene after being accused of predatory conduct.
The lack of any other known cases in the past 20 years does not, however, mean that coaches have always been professional in their relationships with players. It simply means that this is a taboo subject which only rarely breaks cover.
‘If I had a daughter, would she want to play tennis? That would concern me’
One of those unusual occasions happened at the 2022 US Open, when the former world No 1 Victoria Azarenka made an oblique reference to “manipulative” coaches during a post-match press conference.
Invited to expand, Azarenka added: “It happens right and left on the tour… because we see those vulnerable young ladies that [are] getting taken advantage of in different situations. If I had a daughter, I would have a question: would she want to play tennis? That would be a very big concern for me.”
Indeed, Rybakina is not the only former Wimbledon champion to be associated with allegedly inappropriate coaching relationships. Three years ago, Telegraph Sport published a moving first-person account from five-time Wimbledon doubles champion Pam Shriver about her secret affair with her much-older coach Don Candy. As she wrote in that article, “My main motivation is to let people know this still goes on – a lot.”
Shriver has since used her position as a leading commentator, coach and pundit to highlight the potential problems that the tennis tour keeps throwing up. In fact, Shriver posted a critical post on X in January (see below) when Rybakina announced that Vukov was returning to her team, calling it a “sad situation”.
Unfortunately, tennis’s mechanics make it all too easy for professional relationships to stray into more complicated territory. For one thing, young players making their way on the tour often share rooms with their coaches to save money. And then there is the essential insecurity of the coach’s role.
Eighteen months ago, Telegraph Sport published an extended report on these issues which featured revealing insights from Naomi Cavaday – the former British No 3 who sometimes found herself on the same trips as a rare female predator, the later-jailed coach Claire Lyte.
“Being a coach on the tour is an incredibly insecure job,” Cavaday said. “Which leads to a lot of this unprofessional behaviour. It helps the coach feel a bit more secure if he has created a much closer personal relationship. I often see coaches leaning on that to make it harder for female players to get rid of them from their team.”
At certain times in the past, the WTA has tried to suppress discussion of these issues – as when the investigative journalist Michael Mewshaw addressed them in a revealing book called Ladies of the Court.
Published in 1993, the book reported players talking openly about their rivals’ relationships with coaches, with the former Wimbledon finalist Hana Mandlikova describing one such situation as “sickening”. But Ladies of the Court was banned from being sold at official tour events, while Mewshaw himself was denied a credential to Miami’s Lipton Open shortly after publication.
If the whole issue has become slightly more high-profile in the last couple of years, that owes much to the taboo-breaking comments of people such as Shriver, Azarenka and Cavaday.
To its credit, the WTA has responded to what we might call tennis’s #MeToo moment. Having appointed Lindsay Brandon as its first head of safeguarding in 2022, it released a new code of conduct shortly before Christmas, and is now acting upon it.
We may not have heard the last of the Vukov case, especially as he appears to have Rybakina’s support. But if nothing else, WTA Portia Archer– who only joined the WTA as chief executive in August – has taken the organisation into new territory with this bold stand.
