Jack Draper put it best. His view was offered in response to something Katie Boulter disclosed earlier this week, when she took the admirable step of sharing the filth that gets sent to her social media accounts.
By now, we are well aware of the toxic messaging that regularly finds its way to an athlete’s inbox — abusive, threatening, often from a faceless minority of low-lives who follow a bad bet with worse judgments on whom to blame.
Speculating on how those trolls might look in everyday life, away from their anonymous usernames, Draper went for a descriptive approach: ‘I take comfort in knowing that whoever’s doing it is probably sat on their mum’s couch, nailing a bag of Quavers with their pants on.’
I liked that — he minimised the offenders to a level where they belong.
But such perspective is not always so easy when you’re in the middle of it, drawn by natural urges to read your mail. Boulter’s experience of doing so has been grim.
One of the messages, sent to her on Instagram after she beat Carole Monnet at the French Open, read: ‘Hope you get cancer you piece of ****.’
Katie Boulter gave an insight recently into the level of abuse of threats athletes receive
Jack Draper did well to poke fun at them but it is not always easy to brush off the vitriol
Emma Raducanu’s stalking case exemplifies the dangers that can spiral out of control
Another nonsensical string of ramblings threatened to damage her ‘grandmother’s grave if she’s not dead by tomorrow’. It also spoke of ‘candles and a coffin for your entire family’.
A third example: ‘Go to hell, I lost money my mother sent me.’
Presumably, many Quavers were nailed amid the trauma that day, but there is limited mileage in exploring the motivations and issues of the unhinged. Limited information, too, because not much gets through their masks and the cowardice of anonymity carries that advantage.
But we can talk about the impact, which lands differently with each recipient — some can ignore it more readily than others, some allow it to burrow in deep and, most depressing, all have been conditioned to accept this is now a cost of doing business. That’s a sad reality.
To hear Boulter speak so openly was a reminder of what it does to the individual, to the human, away from the more generic discussions we regularly have in this area.
As she put it: ‘I think it just kind of shows how vulnerable we are. You really don’t know if this person is on site. You really don’t know if they’re nearby or if they know where you live.’
It takes a special breed of fool to cause that kind of fear and uncertainty in a stranger, but they do so all the same. And have done for years — it’s not new and it’s also not getting any better, which is the real problem.
The Women’s Tennis Association and the International Tennis Federation quantified the extent of the issue this week. They tracked the social media accounts of thousands of players in the 2024 season, and the results were alarming and echo louder here because Wimbledon is on our horizon.
Katie Boulter expressed fears that her digital abusers could be on site at tournament
Iga Swiatek and Naomi Osaka are among the worst-hit players, Mail Sport understands
Tennis authorities found around 8,000 abusive comments on posts during the 2024 season
They trawled through 1.6million posts and found that around 8,000 messages from 4,200 accounts were abusive, violent or threatening to 458 different players. Of the latter, five drew 26 per cent of the abuse and my understanding is that the five-time Slam winner Iga Swiatek and Naomi Osaka, the former champion of the Australian and US Opens, tend to suffer the worst of it.
I had a couple of thoughts about the report. One was the continued sense that even with the best intentions, we barely scratch the surface in our assessment of sporting results — there is always more going on than we see.
They are the little and large factors that sap an athlete at the wrong time. Factors that you might override on a Wednesday but catch you cold on Thursday; factors that are easy to dismiss in the right circumstances but can creep in as nasty mood music when the grind of a sporting life is going against you. They don’t get written into scorelines, so they make Boulter’s contribution this week all the more necessary.
With tennis in mind, I’d hope Emma Raducanu’s difficulties on the court have also drawn more empathy after the revelations that a stalker pursued her across four countries in Asia and the Middle East earlier this year.
Some of her issues in the game have seemed self-inflicted at times, but focusing on a repeatable service motion is substantially harder when lunatics are pinching shoes from your front porch or monitoring your movements on the streets of Dubai.
Just this week it emerged that Raducanu’s latest stalker had been trying to get tickets for Wimbledon. Thankfully, his efforts were detected and blocked, but it is hardly an ideal backdrop for her annual examination against our expectations.
The other thought upon reading the report went to a more obvious place — the impunity with which some use social media and a loathing for how they are allowed to get away with it.
The findings stated that 40 per cent of all the tennis abuse came from ‘angry gamblers’, but it has also become apparent how little can be done. The FBI got involved in a few cases in the US, a number of prolific accounts have been shut down further afield, but it is a Wild West landscape.
Social media companies must clamp down on anonymous users making multiple accounts
The toxicity will not avail unless the tech giants start treating digital abuse seriously
Mail Sport’s Riath Al-Samarrai encourages viewers to remember the personal turmoil athletes can be going through when we judge their performances
It is a fight akin to bailing out the Titanic with a thimble — set up an account in a fake name and if you get shut down, set up another. Rinse, repeat, eat more Quavers. On that basis, the gambling industry is no better equipped than the next guy when it comes to pinning an anonymous account to a real, convictable person.
The only entities with any real power in this hideous scenario are the social media companies, and they have no apparent desire for change. When I contacted Meta, who own Facebook and Instagram, they avoided the question of whether they would ever require a verifiable ID from their users. Nor did they supply data for how many accounts had been suspended or deleted for sports-related abuse. X didn’t respond.
For as long as those slack barriers exist, and for as long as such a populated sphere is policed with such indifference, the toxicity will continue, including the wishes of cancer on tennis players.
The sympathy here is for those like Boulter campaigning for it to be different. That’s a worthy undertaking and also a futile one, sadly.
But at the very least we might consider using it as a little context behind the serves, volleys and scores this summer.
Get off Hatton’s back
There is a temptation to view Tyrrell Hatton through the showreel of his many tantrums and eruptions. To be fair to all of us, he makes that easier than most.
But the great mistake comes from not recognising the talent that accompanies his rage. At a US Open course that was designed to scramble brains, he proved that point last weekend.
Only three men had the game to navigate the Oakmont test in a lower score and none matched his entertainment value. The sport needs him more than those who whine incessantly about codes of behaviour might care to realise.
Fans must recognise Tyrrell Hatton’s talent and not just see him through the prism of tantrums
Al-Hilal’s draw with Real Madrid is potentially a signal of the progress Saudi Arabian sides are making, but that is little surprise after the money they have spent
Saudi sides catching up?
If there is to be any meaning gleaned from this Club World Cup, it might come from the charting of Saudi Arabian football against sides from the established leagues.
By that standard, Al-Hilal’s performance in holding Real Madrid to a 1-1 draw, and in particular one 40-pass move that carved through Real from stern to bow, was illuminating.
Folk might not like it but there is also an inevitability to how this business works.
