The intruder of the news gives each evening a spotlight on a personality who could have passed under the radars of the news.
The conflict in Ukraine continues to be very present in many sports venues. Sunday June 4 at Roland-Garros, the Russian Daria Kasatkina (9th in the world and number 1 in Russia) loses against the Ukrainian Elina Svitolina (192nd in the WTA rankings who has just returned from maternity leave after being number 3 in the world). Kasatkina knows that the Ukrainian does not want to shake hands with a Russian because of the war in her country. So as not to embarrass him, she therefore goes directly and intentionally towards the chair to greet the referee, without approaching the net as is customary. And from a distance, she applauds the winner, looking at her. Svitolina, by the way, understands this perfectly. She responds with a thumbs up. Between the two players, so no worries. It turns out that they like each other. Except that the public obviously does not seek to understand. And begins to whistle the Russian copiously, perhaps believing her to be a bad loser.
And Monday morning, therefore, Kasatkina posted this message on Twitter. “I leave Paris very bitter. After every game I played in Paris, I always appreciated and thanked the public. But yesterday I was booed for simply respecting my opponent’s position of not hugging him. the hand.” She explains that those whistles were worse than the defeat itself. And she adds: “Love each other. Don’t spread hate. Try to make this world a better place. I love Roland-Garros no matter what. See you next year.” Followed by a French flag.
What the public did not understand was that not all Ukrainian women shake hands with either Russians or Belarusians, from the beginning. In this case, the worst thing is that this Russian, Daria Kasatkina, openly takes positions against Vladimir Putin’s war. And it’s not from yesterday. Last summer – she was 25 – in front of a fairly famous Russian YouTuber, Vitya Kravchenko, she said all the bad things she thought about this war that started in February. That not a day went by that she didn’t think about it and that she wanted it to stop. Lucid, she was sorry, explaining: “It’s not Daria Kasatkina, 25, tennis player, dumb as a broom, who will change things.” But she even went so far as not to rule out a change of nationality… And then in the same video, she took the opportunity to come out and reveal her homosexuality.
A few hours before the publication of this video, six deputies of the Duma had presented a bill prohibiting not LGBTQI + relations (already prohibited since 2013) but any speech on the subject and any content LGBTQI+ in the cinema in Russia.
We suspect it, Daria Kasatkina no longer lives in Russia, but in Spain with her partner Natalia Zabiiako, a bronze medal skater at the world championships in 2019. The two lovers regularly post photos of themselves on social networks . Last summer, following this video, Kasatkina was set on fire by the Russian media. The only presenter to have supported her, Sofya Tartakova, who is also her press officer, had been suspended. And when the youtubeur Kravchenko, at the end of the interview, asked her if she was afraid of not being able to return to Russia and see her family again, she burst into tears.
As a tennis player, what happened yesterday is also painful because of the special history she has with Roland-Garros. Semi-finalist last year, she mainly won the junior tournament in 2014. She won six singles tournaments at this stage of her career. But it’s in Paris, she says, that she feels “like at home”. Unlike Europeans growing up on clay, in Russia she never saw one until she was 10 years old. Since then, she loves it. It’s his favorite surface. She finds it very intuitive, it allows you to do so many different shots. And his idol, since childhood, is the prince of clay, Rafael Nadal.