Indian Wells Masters – Rafael Nadal opens up on Naomi Osaka heckling incident: Rafael Nadal on Monday expressed sympathy for Naomi Osaka following her tearful exit at Indian Wells, but believes players should learn to deal with hostile fans. Follow InsideSport.IN for more updates on Indian Wells Masters.
Four-time Grand Slam champion Osaka was reduced to tears by a heckler on Saturday as she crashed out of the tournament in a straight sets defeat to Veronika Kudermetova.
Indian Wells Masters: It was another uncomfortable moment for Osaka, who put mental health in the spotlight last year after revealing she had suffered from depression.
Naomi Osaka addressed crowd at #IndianWells after her loss. Says the heckler didn’t bother her as much as the flashback in her head to when Venus & Serena Williams, along with Richard, were booed & heckled years ago. Serena boycotted the tourney for 14 yrs pic.twitter.com/Umb8tMvKFP
— Josh Sánchez (@joshnsanchez) March 13, 2022
Speaking after his 7-5, 6-3 third round win over England’s Dan Evans on Monday, Nadal said he felt sorry for Osaka, who was subjected to a taunt of “Naomi, you suck” during her loss on Saturday.
Indian Wells Masters: However the 21-time Grand Slam king said he believes that players should learn to be ready for hostile atmospheres.
Asked for his opinion about athletes being subjected to negative comments from the crowd, Nadal replied: “These kinds of questions are tough to answer.
“The easy answer for me is ‘I feel terrible about what happened, that never should happen.'”
“Even if is terrible to hear from that, we need to be prepared for that, no?” he said. “We need to resist these kind of issues that can happen when you are exposed to the people, no?
Indian Wells Masters: “I understand that probably Naomi, suffered a lot with these, probably kind of issues that she has, mental (health) issues. The only thing that I wish her is recover well from that and wish her all the very best.
“But the life, nothing is perfect in this life, no? We need to be ready for adversities.”
“But it’s always been something that’s been part of sport, I guess, as well. So you have to, I guess, be prepared for that in some ways and be able to tolerate it because it does happen regularly across all sports.”
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