Will Duchess Kate even bother to attend the Wimbledon singles finals?

We’re headed into the final weekend of Wimbledon, with the women’s singles final being held on Saturday and the men’s singles final on Sunday. One of the women’s finalists is Ons Jabeur, a Tunisian woman and the first Arab player in the top ten and the first Arab/Tunisian woman in a Wimbledon final. The other finalist is Elena Rybakina, a Russian-born Moscow resident who plays under Kazakhstan’s flag. Early in her career, Rybakina sought support from the Russian tennis federation, and they declined, so she changed nationalities to get support and money from Kazakhstan.

Rybakina’s great run to the final is particularly interesting because this year, Wimbledon banned all Russian and Belarussian players from the tournament. The All-England Club made the ban because they didn’t want to be used as a propaganda tool with Putin’s regime after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the Telegraph also claimed, bizarrely, that Wimbledon banned Russian and Belarussian players to “spare” their royal patron, the Duchess of Cambridge. As in, Kate is too precious to Wimbledon to have her sully herself by handing over a trophy to a Russian or Belarussian player. The Telegraph actually equated “handing the trophy to the winner” with “being seen as endorsing the Russian regime.”

So the question a lot of people have is… will Wimbledon’s royal patron even come out for the women’s final, given Elena Rybakina’s run to the final? The British media has been doing the most to talk up “Elena Rybakina plays for Kazakhstan” but it just falls flat because… she’s demonstrably Russian. Still, if the point of all of this was that Wimbledon didn’t want to be part of Putin’s propaganda, the fact that Rybakina gets little to no support from Russia will probably help her image in the UK, and maybe that’s why Kate will show up to the women’s final. Who knows though.

Additionally, one of the men’s singles finalists, Nick Kyrigios, has been ordered to appear in an Australian court in a few weeks on charges of assault and battery of a then-girlfriend. I bet Kate won’t be “spared” from presenting the trophies to the men’s finalists though. Weird that the same argument doesn’t apply – surely by presenting a trophy to a credibly accused abuser would be seen as endorsing domestic abuse?

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.