First published March 3, 2022.
On 1 March 2022, less than a week after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine's Elina Svitolina beat Russia's Anastasia Potapova 6-2, 6-1 in the first round of the Monterrey Open in Mexico. Days earlier she had said she would not take the court against her. She changed course only after tennis's governing bodies agreed that Russian and Belarusian players would compete without their flag or country name.
Svitolina, the top seed, walked out in yellow and blue, the colours of Ukraine's flag, and pledged to give every dollar she earned at the tournament to the Ukrainian army. Here is how a routine first-round match became one of the first sporting flashpoints of the war, what each player said, and how the story developed afterwards.
What happened in Monterrey
The Monterrey Open is a WTA 250 hard-court event held at Club Sonoma. The 2022 edition ran from 28 February to 6 March. When the draw paired Svitolina with Potapova, the timing could hardly have been more charged: Russian troops had crossed into Ukraine on 24 February, and Ukrainian cities, including Svitolina's hometown of Odesa, were preparing for attack.
In the days before the match, Svitolina posted a statement on behalf of Ukrainian players. They had asked the ATP, the WTA and the International Tennis Federation (ITF) to follow the International Olympic Committee's recommendation that athletes from Russia and Belarus should only be accepted as neutrals, with no flags, anthems, colours or other national symbols. Until that happened, she said, she would not play the scheduled match or any other against a Russian or Belarusian opponent.
The governing bodies acted quickly. On Tuesday 1 March they issued a joint statement: players from Russia and Belarus could keep competing on the international tours, but not under the name or flag of their country. The combined ATP and WTA event planned for Moscow in October was also suspended. With her condition met, Svitolina played that evening and needed only two sets to win.
Afterwards she described the evening as a very special match, played in a sad mood. "I was on a mission for my country," she told reporters. She then faced Bulgaria's Viktoriya Tomova in the round of 16.
Why her protest was about symbols, not players
Headlines at the time often said that Svitolina had "refused to play a Russian". That shorthand misses the point she was making. Her request was aimed at the sporting organisations and at national representation, not at Potapova as a person. In the same statement she stressed, "I do not blame any of the Russian athletes," and said they were not responsible for the invasion. She also thanked players from Russia and Belarus who had publicly spoken out against the war.
That distinction matters. In individual sports such as tennis, players enter events as individuals, but the scoreboard, broadcast graphics and draw sheets still show a flag beside each name. For Ukrainian players, a Russian flag on screen while their own country was being bombed felt like a national statement. Removing the flag allowed the match to go ahead without either player being treated as a representative of a state.
What Anastasia Potapova said
Potapova, born in Saratov in 2001, was 20 at the time and one of Russia's brightest young players. She had won the junior Wimbledon title in 2016, beating Ukraine's Dayana Yastremska in the final, and had briefly been world number one in the junior rankings.
Before the match she had posted a message on Instagram. In it she said she had grown up dreaming of playing tennis without choosing opponents by nationality, that athletes were becoming hostages of the political situation, and that, although she considered herself far from politics, "I am against grief, tears and war." It was one of the earliest anti-war statements from a Russian player, at a time when speaking out carried real risk at home.
Potapova's career continued under the neutral designation. A few weeks later, in April 2022, she came through qualifying to win her first WTA title in Istanbul, beating Veronika Kudermetova in the final. She was later shut out of Wimbledon 2022 when the All England Club barred Russian and Belarusian entrants, and in March 2023 the WTA formally warned her for wearing a Spartak Moscow football shirt before a match at Indian Wells, which critics saw as insensitive during the war. She said she had supported the club since childhood and meant no provocation.
How the wider sporting world responded
Tennis was not alone. On 28 February 2022, FIFA and UEFA jointly suspended Russian national teams and Russian clubs from their competitions, which removed Russia from the World Cup qualifying play-offs and from European club tournaments. Several national football associations, including those of Poland, Sweden and the Czech Republic, had already said they would not play Russia.
Different sports drew the line in different places. Team sports, where a squad formally represents a nation, tended to exclude Russia outright. Individual sports such as tennis mostly allowed players to continue as neutrals. Wimbledon's 2022 ban was the main exception in tennis and cost the event its ranking points that year. By 2023 Wimbledon had reversed course and admitted neutral athletes.
The neutral-athlete model was not new. It echoed arrangements used at earlier Olympic Games after Russia's state-sponsored doping scandal, when Russian competitors appeared under labels such as "Olympic Athletes from Russia" or "ROC".
What happened to Svitolina next
Svitolina's run in Monterrey ended in the quarter-finals, where she lost to Colombia's Camila Osorio. The title went to Canada's Leylah Fernandez, who beat Osorio in a final-set tiebreak. Svitolina had won the Monterrey title in 2020, the 14th of her career.
On 31 March 2022 she announced a break from the tour, citing back pain and the emotional toll of the war. In May she revealed she was expecting her first child with her husband, the French player Gaël Monfils, and their daughter was born later that year. Off court she worked as an ambassador for the United24 fundraising platform launched by Ukraine's government.
Her return in April 2023 was remarkable. Within weeks she won the title in Strasbourg, and at Wimbledon that July, entering as a wildcard, she beat world number one Iga Świątek on the way to the semi-finals. She continued her policy of not shaking hands with Russian and Belarusian opponents after matches, a choice the WTA publicly accepted, and she has spoken in support of other Ukrainian athletes who did the same.
Why this match still matters
Svitolina already had a strong record before 2022: the 2018 WTA Finals title, a career-high ranking of world number three, and Ukraine's first Olympic tennis medal, a bronze in singles at Tokyo in 2021. Yet the Monterrey match is often the moment people remember first, because it showed how quickly the war reached into everyday sporting life.
It also set a pattern that lasted. The questions raised that week, whether athletes should answer for their governments, how flags and anthems should be handled, and whether a handshake is a courtesy or a statement, came back again and again: in the 2023 fencing row over Olga Kharlan's refused handshake, and at the Paris 2024 Olympics, where Russians and Belarusians could only enter as individual neutral athletes. The Monterrey episode offered one workable answer: compete as individuals, leave the national symbols out, and let players speak for themselves.
Sources: Sports Illustrated, 2 March 2022: Svitolina vows to donate prize money to Ukrainian army; Wikipedia: 2022 Monterrey Open; Wikipedia: Elina Svitolina; Wikipedia: Anastasia Potapova. Statements from both players were first reported via MSN.
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