More fuel to the fire - no reason he should get a pass when other people can't. Sorry - it's only tennis and he's trying to cheat to get in. This isn't to political leaders talking about the fate of their people.
Sorry, I don't really follow those sports news, so maybe I missed something; but how did he try to cheat? He applied to Australian Open for an exemption, and was granted an exemption [0]. How is this cheating?
[0] - https://twitter.com/BenRothenberg/status/1478329044156309505
It's not like he tried to cheat the tournament or Australia with this. He was following a provided process.
Note, this is separate from any notion of him cheating or not with the process. Just saying it doesn't appear he tried to sneak in by bypassing the processes.
The reason he's being looked at instead of the others who went through this process is likely that he posted about it on social media.
They're not the Australian federal government though, so it's moot.
Djokovic may have a claim against the Australian Open for wasting time and causing inconvenience.
That doesn't mean Canberra must grant him a visa. And it is in no way an excuse for submitting falsified documents (if he did that, which is far from proven) to Canberra and her courts.
The dynamics here are interesting, too.
Just because the public outcry might have prompted politicians to intervene doesn't mean they were wrong to do so
If the evidence presented here holds, Djokovic submitted falsified documents to the Australian government and courts. That's potentially visa fraud, perjury and a bunch of things that would put an ordinary person behind bars for years.
> Djokovic submitted falsified documents
If the dates are real from the records everyone has found then he would, in theory, still qualify. So, why change the dates?
Djokovic has people who do all this stuff for him. I wonder if something happened in translation or somewhere else.
The motive seems to be missing.
Djokovic pursued an exemption on the basis of recovery. That requires a positive test followed by a negative one. If the allegations here hold, he tested negative and then positive. That wouldn't be proof of recovery, but of infection.
For example, was he getting regular rests due to being tennis? Did the wrong ID for the recovery test result get submitted by accident? This is plausible and accidents do happen.
I'll be curious to see more details that come out on this.
"people are welcome in Australia. But if you're not double vaccinated and you're not an Australian resident or citizen, well, you can't come." - Australian PM Scott Morrison - 6th Jan https://www.pm.gov.au/media/press-conference-canberra-act-35
According to the ATAGI guidelines (which are not the border rules), previous covid infection is not a contraindication for vaccination, and as a temporary exemption vaccination can only be deferred by up to 6 months in the case of "acute major medical illness".
Apparently Tennis Australia was specifically told this by border patrol but they didn't pass that information on to the players. Probably everyone was too chicken to tell Novak.
On that note, I have no idea on what basis he was granted an exemption when he applied for his visa in November, given that he had not even been covid positive in the last 6 months (at that time, lol).
I have a bit of sympathy for Novak with the lack of concise communication but at the end of the day he wouldn't be the first person who has been irritated by bad government communication, or the first person to be turned away from a country because of confusing border rules.
- lied about travel activity beforr entering Australia (he declared not having traveled within 14 days prior to entering the country but he flew from spain and had an interview in serbia during this time)
- if what zerforschung found here he did not have a negative PCR after getting a positive PCR test first (which would mean he cannot infect others and has bery likely immunity), but a negative PCR and *then* a positive PCR after, which could in the worst case mean he was infected and still travel.
But as he is a private citizen seeking glory in AU, it's inappropriate to make an exception in this case.
I thought 'open' meant 'open to people from outside the host region' not 'open to amateurs and professionals alike'?
Eventually tournaments became Open as they also allowed pros in.
The US Open in chess is open to anyone who is a USCF member, which is anyone who wants to buy a membership ($45/year, $40 for seniors, $27 for young adults, $20 for youth, $85 family plan covers parent and children under 19 and college age students up to 24, $55 family plan that covers all children under 19 in the same household). Obtain a USCF membership, pay the US Open entry fee, and you are in.
When you play in the open, regardless of whether you are an experience pro grandmaster or some newbie who barely knows the rules that entered on a whim, everyone is in the same group. It uses the Swiss system rather than a knockout system, so every plays the same number of games.
There's really not much difference as far as the tournament goes between that top grandmaster and that newbie, except that the press and spectators will be a lot more interested in watching the grandmaster play, so the top boards will usually be set off in some place making it easier for observers, and they might be fancy wood boards and set instead of the paper or vinyl boards and plastic pieces most players will be using, and maybe nicer chairs.
If that newbie wins enough to be a leader, that newbie will be playing on those top boards.
If that grandmaster has some bad games and ends up in the middle of the pack, they will be down playing with the hoi polloi.
BTW, if you win the US Open you are automatically invited to the US Championship, an invitation only round robin tournament.
Every other year the US Championship also serves as the "zonal" tournament for the US in the World Championship cycle. Doing well in your zone's zonal earns you a spot in the FIDE World Cup. Doing well in the World Cup earns you a spot in the Candidates Tournament. Win that and you are the next challenger for the World Chess Championship.
In chess then if you sell your soul to the Devil in exchange for winning the next 50 games of chess you play you should be able to become World Champion!
9 to sweep the US Open, 11 to sweep the US Championship, 8 for the World Cup, 14 for the Candidates Tournament, and 8 for your match with Carlsen for the Championship.
Is there any other individual sport or game where selling your soul gets you such a short path from complete unknown to World Champion?
Should all of the people who got exceptions be turned away now?
Was the Australian Open tournament wrong for providing this process? Was Novak wrong for taking advantage of a process provided by the tournament?
Some (or maybe all) already were.
Windsor Ontario has something like 1000+ health care workers commuting to the Detroit area that have been exempt from most entry test/vaccination/quarantine requirements. Same for truckers and flight crews and ~30 other groups.
I think this is only changing next week with an actual vaccination requirement.
If you want to go for covid-zero, go for it, but if you half-ass it, you get all the disadvantages without any of the advantages.
Probably not even worth attempting given our border has so many illegal crossings.
Covid-zero is impossible in any open society. China is still pursuing a covid-zero policy, but even with locking down entire cities and imposing travel bans they're far from zero.
I think this dichotomy (prevents vs doesn't prevent) is false. Vaccination reduces the likelihood of getting infected and it reduces the likelihood of severe illness. Perhaps not to the same degree, but my point here is that it's not black & white as the quoted wording implies.
It may increase it by selecting the un-protected strains.
> it doesn't prevent infection or transmission
Source? We’ve (largely) vaccinated our way out of other diseases. I haven’t heard of any outbreaks of mild measles or mild rubella and I suspect it’s because vaccination gets the R lower.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
If we end up with measles2 and rubella2, I wouldn’t be surprised if my measles1 and rubella1 vaccines weren’t effective.
On top of they are 66% less infectious when being infected since they clear the virus twice as fast and 40% of their virus particles are dead.
This gives them an overall reduced risk of infecting someone else by 93%.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.24.21266831v...
https://news.arizona.edu/story/covid-19-vaccine-reduces-seve...
Q: How long does that reduced risk persist for?
Then read this story:
We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months, says JCVI chief https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/03/fourth-covid-jab...
"Prof Sir Andrew Pollard said there was no point in trying to stop all infections, and that 'at some point, society has to open up'"
Are there many previously young and healthy people ending up in hospital with Covid?
Yes, of course, more than a thousand of children and young adults in their prime died just in US.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wrecked-lives-families-young-adult...
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/study-number-of-kids...
In these events he is not standing up against anything. He appears to be quietly proving false statements about his test results and/or his recent travel history in order to manipulate the system to his advantage (i.e. gain the ability to take part in a tournament in a country he is likely not eligible to enter).
Real question is why are the Australians running an international tennis competition in the first place?
Although in this case at least they've been doing it for 117 years... so they do have precedent on their side.
That's not what they're doing, which is the whole point of this story and controversy.
But anyway a tennis competition should be the very bottom of the list of anyone's priorities.