Engaged in the Romanian tournament in Cluj-Napoca as seed number 1, Alizé Cornet was, unfortunately, eliminated in the first round, this Tuesday, August 3. A defeat that earned her terrible insults, uttered on social networks by Internet users who the tennis player identifies as sports bettors.
The Frenchwoman decided to report her behavior by posting screenshots of these hateful messages on Twitter. “It seems that the mental health of athletes is in tune with the times … We understand better why! Long live sports bettors, ”he wrote.
I played it in the @jdoreofficiel tonight … and I still have fifty left in stock!
It seems that the mental health of athletes is in tune with the times … We can better understand why!
Long live sports bettors pic.twitter.com/7QTdAZcz6h
– Alize Cornet (@alizecornet) August 3, 2021
The comments he shares are incredibly violent. The young woman is threatened with rape if she does not “withdraw from tennis”, one Internet user wants her to be deceived by her partner, another who sees “her whole family die”. The athlete is insulted by all names, accused of being “a scandal for tennis and women’s sports.”
According to Alizé Cornet, the authors of these insults attack her because she made them lose their bet by being eliminated during the tournament. The young woman is not the first to denounce the behavior of certain sports bettors: in February 2020, tennis player Corentin Moutet even temporarily left Twitter, ceasing to support “free evil.”
“Why are they insulting my family? Why do they want me to hurt me? The bettors are betting on me, but I never promised them I was going to win. They play a game. When I lose a game, I don’t insult him. the referee or the opponent, ”he said. The team.
Gaël Monfils and Caroline García also said they were victims of this type of cyberbullying. The phenomenon is recurrent enough that the French Tennis Federation establishes a dedicated listening unit, responsible for providing psychological, and even legal, support to the players involved.
Alizé Cornet’s testimony comes at a time when the issue of the mental health of high-level athletes is increasingly highlighted. Naomi Osaka, also a tennis player, highlighted the importance of it during the last edition of Roland Garros and Simone Biles, an American gymnast, also confided her difficulty in handling the pressure she is subjected to during the Tokyo Olympics.