Given what goes on in there, people are generally very sensitive to the rules of bathroom etiquette and don’t look kindly upon those who violate them. One such unwritten rule of using the bathroom is doing what needs to be done without taking too long to do it — which a player at the US Open is seemingly violating.
Greek tennis player Stefanos Tsitsipas has become the subject of scorn at the US Open, as fans and competitors alike are unhappy with the excessively long toilet breaks he has taken during the tournament. On Wednesday, Tsitsipas took an eight-minute toilet break between the end of the third set and the start of the fourth during a match against Adrian Mannarino.
It lead to boos from the crowd, according to The Guardian.
Tsitsipas’ habits continued a trend throughout the tournament. He earned the ire of Andy Murray through his bathroom breaks, which Murray believed were specifically and deliberately timed out in order to give him a competitive advantage.
“When you’re playing a brutal match like that, you know, stopping for seven, eight minutes, you do cool down,” Murray said. “You can prepare for it mentally as much as you like, but it’s the fact that it does affect you physically when you take a break that long, well, multiple times during the match.”
Murray’s grievances were shared by both Mannarino and Sloane Stephens, who took issue with The Grand Slam rules concerning bathroom breaks. While the rules state that players should take a “reasonable” amount of time, exactly what constitutes “reasonable” is highly ambiguous.
For his part, Tsitsipas defended himself following the jeers from the crowd and claimed he had done nothing wrong.
“I have nothing against them. I love the fans. But some people don’t understand. That’s all,” Tsitsipas said. “They don’t understand. They haven’t played tennis at a high level to understand how much effort and how much difficult it is to do what we are doing. Sometimes we need a short break to do what we have to do.”
Tsitsipas ended up prevailing over Mannarino, moving him through to Round 3.
