Saudi money could be headed to tennis next. Is it about sportswashing, women's rights or both?
Tennis appears set to follow the path of golf and other sports by doing business with Saudi Arabia and its $650 billion sovereign wealth fund
WIMBLEDON, England — Egyptian tennis pro Mayar Sherif does not pretend to be an expert on the subject of Saudi Arabia’s record on women’s rights, other than to say: “I know it’s not the best.”
What Sherif, who made her Wimbledon debut this week, did say is she thinks it’s possible positive steps can be made in that area if tennis follows the path of golf and other sports by doing business with — and competing in — the kingdom that boasts a $650 billion sovereign wealth fund.
“Women’s rights in the Arabic world need to improve.… If you start changing this from the outside by bringing in tournaments, and start to create a different kind of atmosphere, that’s going to help,” Sherif said in an interview with The Associated Press at the All England Club. “If you put women with skirts — and so on and so forth — on court, maybe one young girl from Saudi Arabia sees the matches there and says, ‘I want to play tennis. I want to be like those girls.’ And that’s a way to change a mindset.”
Sherif is not alone in hoping for that sort of transformative effect in a place where rights groups say women continue to face discrimination in most aspects of family life and homosexuality is a major taboo, as it is in most of the rest of the Middle East. Whether engagement will work, as International Tennis Hall of Famer and rights advocate Billie Jean King argues (“I don’t think you really change unless you engage,” she said last week), or this whole phenomenon is an example of “sportswashing,” whereby Saudi Arabia and other countries — think of Russia or China hosting the Olympics, or Qatar hosting the
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