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Off Court and Under Fire: The WTA’s Crisis of Conscience

Originally posted on TennisUpToDate.com | By Aron Solomon | Last updated Aug 7, 2025 3:51 PM ET

We’re smack in the middle of peak tennis season, and I’m writing from Montréal, where the WTA 1000 Omnium Banque Nationale is wrapping up tonight. Over in Toronto, the men’s Canadian Open is happening in parallel. Together with the upcoming tournament in Cincinnati, these events form the critical hard-court lead-up to the U.S. Open, which kicks off in late August.

But let me start with something beautiful. Tonight, an 18-year-old Canadian phenom named Victoria Mboko will walk onto Centre Court to face Naomi Osaka in the final. A year ago, Mboko was ranked outside the top 350 in the world. Today, she’s playing for one of the more important titles in the sport, a WTA Masters. Her run these two weeks has been nothing short of miraculous—equal parts power, precision, and poise. She’s moved like she was born on hard courts and fought like she doesn’t know what the word “intimidated” means. This isn’t potential—it’s the most firm of arrivals.

Canada hasn’t had a breakout like this since Bianca Andreescu’s U.S. Open title (as well as this self-same Canadian Open) in 2019. Mboko is officially a star, and the WTA is already salivating over what she represents: youth, charisma, marketability. Her social media following is climbing. Sponsors are circling. The machine is warming up for the woman who, if she wins on Thursday night, will surpass local Montreal hero, Leylah Annie Fernandez, as the top-ranked Canadian.

But if you’ve been paying attention to the machinery of women’s tennis, you’ll understand why this meteoric rise should come with a blinking red warning light. The WTA doesn’t just fail to protect its athletes—it often seems designed to break them.

Case in point: Lesia Tsurenko

She’s not in the draw here in Montréal. I’ve watched her play many times over the years and always admired her game. Her absence isn’t about injury or retirement. Tsurenko, who is by all measure an extremely fine person as well as an amazing tennis player, has said plainly that her mind and body aren’t in the condition to compete at the highest level—and she traces that not just to the trauma of Russia’s invasion of her native Ukraine, but to what she passionately described as a betrayal by the Women’s Tennis Association.

Late last year, Tsurenko filed a lawsuit (and an amended one) in the Southern District of New York against the WTA and its former chairman and CEO, Steve Simon, alleging breach of contract, negligence, and negligent infliction of emotional distress. She claims that in meetings with Ukrainian players shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the WTA made explicit assurances: any Russian or Belarusian player who publicly supported the war would be banned from competition.

According to Tsurenko’s complaint, those promises were never kept. She points to examples, including Russian player Veronika Kudermetova wearing a logo for Taneft—a subsidiary of a company sanctioned by the EU for its ties to the Russian military—during the French Open. And yet, Kudermetova and others continued to compete without consequence.

“Despite this promise,” the amended lawsuit reads, “neither Defendant Steve Simon nor Defendant WTA banned Russian and Belarus players who publicly supported the war.”

Tsurenko says she suffered panic attacks, including one that forced her withdrawal from Indian Wells, and that she experienced long-term emotional distress that affected both her performance and sense of belonging on tour. “Even in my worst nightmares,” she said in April, “I couldn’t imagine that the professional tour, which I considered my home, would become a terrifying and alien place, where the (former) CEO of the organization consciously committed an act of moral abuse against me.”

In 2023, the WTA’s own director of safeguarding informed her that Simon would be investigated for violating the organization’s code of conduct. But later that year, Tsurenko was told the investigation found no wrongdoing. Her appeal was unsuccessful.

The WTA’s response? A carefully lawyered shrug. Yes, they’ve condemned the war, they say. Yes, they’ve stripped player flags and issued generic statements. But as for real accountability? That’s apparently not in the playbook. This isn’t to suggest that there’s no moral complexity here. Reasonable people can argue whether athletes should be punished for their governments’ actions. But that argument misses the larger point: many of these athletes are beneficiaries of state-sponsored sports machines. Their silence, or their symbolism, is often not neutral. And the WTA promised one thing, then quietly delivered another.

Tsurenko wasn’t a fringe player grasping for headlines. She’s a former world No. 23 and a consistent top-50 competitor. Her stature gives this lawsuit weight—and makes it all the more uncomfortable for a WTA that has long struggled with its duty of care. From punishing travel schedules and persistent prize-money gaps, to the sheer emotional toll of navigating a sport that offers little support to those outside the top 50, the WTA seems structured to demand—and discard. Players are assets until they’re liabilities. Then the phone stops ringing.

What happens next for Mboko

Which brings us back to Victoria Mboko. Tonight, she could make history. She already has. But the question no one’s asking is this: What happens next?

Does she become the next Andreescu—plagued by injury and burnout, a ghost of her former self before she turns 24? Does she quietly vanish like so many young talents who couldn’t navigate the relentless grind of the tour without institutional protection? Or worse—does she find, like Tsurenko, that the organization she trusted was never really on her side? That, one day, Mboko is doing what Tsurenko is doing today - posting Instagram pics of hitting a kid’s tennis ball at 5% power?

There’s still time to write a better ending. Mboko—and all the women ahead of and behind her—deserves a system that lifts her up, not one that chews her up. But if the WTA continues to prioritize profits over player welfare, her extraordinary rise may one day be remembered not as the beginning of something brilliant, but as a fleeting spark in a rigged machine.

Because in professional tennis, the greatest threat isn’t always the opponent across the net. Sometimes, it’s the people smiling from the front row, holding the checkbook—and holding their breath that you don’t ask too many questions.

This article first appeared on TennisUpToDate.com and was syndicated with permission.

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