As the August 31 US Open deadline draws nearer, the tournament has expressed its desire to find a way to hold the event on the original scheduled dates and in New York City. Without fans, and while taking many precautions...
This desire was reiterated by Stacy Allaster, the USTA’s Chief Executive for Professional Tennis in a phone interview with Howard Fendrich of the AP on Saturday.
“We continue to be, I would say, 150 percent focused on staging a safe environment for conducting a U.S. Open at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York on our dates. It’s all I wake up—our team wakes up—thinking about,” Allaster said. “The idea of an alternative venue, an alternative date ... we’ve got a responsibility to explore it, but it doesn’t have a lot of momentum.”
According to Allaster, an official announcement about the future of the tournament should come from mid-June to end of June.
According to Fendrich, the USTA is exploring many tactics of mitigation when it comes to protecting athletes and officials from the Coronavirus. Among them are more locker facilities, increased indoor ventilation, daily testing once a player has proven he or she is Covid-19 negative, limited entourages and more.
The USTA says that holding the tournament with any amount of fans in attendance is less and less likely.