Surprise politics

So, Douglas Robson reports that the United Arab Emirates has denied Israeli player Andy Ram a visa for the Dubai Duty Free Masters 500 tournament, which begins on 23 February.

This is the excrement hitting the fan, isn't it? If this is true, clearly the UAE isn't concerned about the media reaction to its refusal to let Shahar Peer enter the country. It has adopted a stance and the WTA and the ATP need to decide rather swiftly how they are going to address this. The top players need to decide how they're going to address this too. Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer would obviously rather eat live snakes than get bogged down in a political mess like this, but if they actually don't react to this it's going to send a message to the UAE, and any other country, that as long as there is sponsorship, players will come. Even if their fellows are discriminated against. 

Players say sports shouldn't be about politics and I generally agree, except that sometimes, everything is about politics, two men hitting a green fuzzy ball over a net included, and there's no getting away from that.

From the article, it's also pretty obvious that the ATP knew this had happened to Ram last year too. It's not a new problem and hopefully the ATP has developed a strategy to deal with similar problems this year (something better than just persuading Israeli players to just not go), although the change of CEO this year can't have made strategy setting easy . Is this where we get to see what sort of stuff Adam Helfant is made of?