How WTA Rules Implicitly Fail
The Fury with no Sound
I recently revisited a Guadalajara 2023 first-round clip between Anastasia Potapova and Emiliana Arango, where a contentious call sequence raises significant concerns about rule application. The Sequence of Play (SoP) is as follows:
Arango hits a backhand shot.
The Line Umpire calls it OUT.
Potapova hits the ball back, which lands in play.
The OUT call is overruled by Ana Carvalho, the Chair Umpire, who calls it IN.
Both players stop the play.
Potapova challenges the corrected call.
Electronic Line Review shows the ball is IN.
Chair Umpire gives the point to Arango, asserting that the corrected call didn’t affect Potapova’s play.
At first glance, even without consulting with the tennis rules, you might intuit that something is off here—the umpire’s correction does, in fact, affect Potapova’s play even if she proclaims otherwise. If we assume the umpire is capable of accurately describing what transpired, it then seems she holds the premise that Potapova’s failed challenge on the corrected call nullifies the fact that she has been involuntarily hindered during the point.
As per the prevailing WTA Rulebook Section VII.H.1.b:
If a call is corrected from “Out” to “Good,” then a let must be called unless the Chair Umpire determines in his/her sole discretion that the ball was a clear ace or a clear winning shot that the player could not have retrieved. If there is any reasonable possibility that the ball could have been played, then the player must be given the benefit of the doubt.
The hindrance arises from the chair umpire’s correct call from OUT to IN, and Potapova managing to retrieve the ball, as outlined in the third event of the SoP, necessitates a point replay. It is important to note that Potapova’s challenge on the umpire’s correct call does not override the hindrance; she does not pause the play to initiate the challenge, and the chair umpire could not have retroactively anticipated that she would have challenged if the line umpire’s OUT call had not occurred.
For those who have been following the WTA Tour long enough, the incident may echo a completely analogous controversy from Doha 2011, where Kader Nouni awarded a point to Lucie Šafářová after correcting an OUT call on Agnieszka Radwańska’s shot despite the Polish having reached the ball and continued the play. Nouni’s ruling, which was later deemed incorrect by the WTA and resulted in an official apology, involved a more ontological misapplication of the hindrance clause: he did demonstrate a piecewise understanding of the clause, but not its situational nuances in the larger context—the order of invocation and insertion in the rule’s adjudication (whereas the Potapova incident stemmed entirely from a factual error, either the umpire’s misinterpretation of reality or her incorrect understanding of the clause).
I have little interest in dissecting mistakes from past matches, certainly not from the one over a decade ago, especially given the already plentiful backlash surrounding it. Though I do wonder how the simple concept of sequence of play was not more broadly applied within the Rulebook to enhance its structural integrity and comprehensiveness. At present, the provision’s framework relies heavily on terminology and an intricate web of cross-references across different sections, aiming for cohesion through redundancy rather than through a streamlined SoP. By structuring a tennis point in the most exhaustive way possible, we achieve not only a more linear narrative, but also a clearer, bijective mapping between key terms, such as “hindrance”, and their contextualized definitions when referenced for umpire’s decision-making process to ensure comparability of all the parts together. A logical and actionable starting point would be to delineate distinct phases for match plays in the chronological order: the preparation phase, initiation, active play, termination, and so forth, and build from there.
There are more pressing issues within the Rulebook arising from ambiguities regarding the Sequence of Events (SoE), a procedural counterpart to SoP. These ambiguities have repercussions beyond merely compromising the integrity of the rule system; they also undermine its interpretability. Consider, for instance, Iga Świątek’s December 2024 ranking situation following the earlier revelation of her provisional suspension under Tennis Anti-Doping Programme due to testing positive for trimetazidine.
As per the applicable Rulebook Section VIII.A.4.a.iii:
If a player receives a zero (0) ranking point result while provisionally suspended under the Integrity Rules and subsequently the provisional suspension is lifted, then
(a) she must count on her ranking all applicable zero (0) ranking point results received from Grand Slams; and
(b) she is not required to count on her ranking any zero (0) ranking point results received from WTA 1000 Mandatory or WTA 500 Tournaments that occurred during her provisional suspension.
During her suspension, Świątek missed three tournaments she had automatically entered or “committed”—WTA 500 Seoul, WTA 1000 Beijing, and WTA 1000 Wuhan. The lifted suspension resulted in a nuance of ranking points calculations—whether zero-point penalties are applied or removed (see the illustration below). WTA’s computations are derivatively sound and valid, so I will not dwell on them. What is intriguing, however, is the timing: WTA implemented a ranking points adjustment on December 9, 2024, a month after Świątek competed in the WTA Finals in Riyadh, after, presumably her provisional suspension had been lifted. It would be tempting to not suspect that the procedural delay was unrelated to the suspension’s public airing in late November. Had the rules been enforced rigorously and the adjustment implemented earlier, might the sudden points deduction have prompted scrutiny regarding its origin then?
Other more trivial yet flagrant slips abound. For example, WTA delayed its decision on whether the Rome event was a Mandatory or Non-mandatory 1000 event until the literal final weeks of the 2023 season, resulting in a points discrepancy that can only be explained by an ad hoc, retroactive rule change. Similarly, the August 19, 2024 ranking of Taylor Townsend, where she attained her career-high ranking of 46, was later revised to 48 near the end of the season due to an incorrect points aggregation.
While these discrepancies may seem inconsequential—the Rome points did not affect the composition of the WTA Finals field in Cancún that year, nor did the retroactive adjustment of Townsend’s ranking affect the cutoff for the tournaments she had entered, the lack of detailed, case-specific clarifications did point to an institutional hesitance to confront or even acknowledge these errors, particularly the systematic ones, not to mention their underlying causes in the first place. In fact, independent recalculation of the WTA weekly rankings using the Rulebook’s prescribed algorithm often reveals inexplicable deviations from the “official” ranking.
But even more concerning than all of these irregularities is the apparent uncritical acceptance of them.