Absurdity
Coco Gauff Disputes A Line Call, Internet Disputes Whether She Should Be Here
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
BEIJING -- Coco Gauff, the reigning U.S. Open champion and one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet, contested a point during her China Open match against home player Sun Xinran last week and was subsequently informed by a significant portion of the internet that the problem, actually, was her.
Gauff described the volume of racist comments she received as "insane," which is, clinically speaking, an understatement, in the same way that a house fire is a heating issue.
The on-court incident itself was, by tennis standards, unremarkable. A point was disputed. Officials were consulted. The match continued. This is a thing that happens in professional tennis approximately forty times a weekend without triggering a civilizational reckoning, but those players have the advantage of not being Coco Gauff.
Within hours of the match, social media platforms, which have invested billions of dollars in artificial intelligence content moderation and whose community guidelines run to roughly the length of the U.S. tax code, successfully allowed thousands of racist comments to reach Gauff's accounts without meaningful interruption. The systems worked as designed, which is the most alarming sentence in this article.
A spokesperson for one major platform said the company takes harassment "extremely seriously" and pointed to its "robust" reporting tools, which allow users to flag individual comments one at a time, like bailing out a flooding basement with a coffee mug.
Novak Djokovic, who has contested more disputed calls than perhaps any player in the modern era and whose behavior toward officials has at various points required its own press conference, released no statement, because nobody sent him any.
Tennis itself, a sport that once suspended an entire tournament over a rain delay and has a dedicated rule about the audible grunt, has not yet convened a committee to address the question of what happens when one of its biggest stars is mass-harassed following a line call. The ITF's public response so far has been consistent with its response to most things: detailed, considered, and scheduled for a later date.
Gauff, for her part, addressed the comments publicly rather than quietly absorbing them, which appeared to surprise people who believe that receiving racism professionally is a skill elite athletes should list alongside their serve speed.
Sun Xinran, the player actually involved in the disputed point, has not been reported to have sent Coco Gauff a single racist comment, which is either a testament to Sun's character or simply proof that the people who did send them were not, in fact, watching the tennis.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coco-gauff-online-racism-china-tournament-dispute/