The Battle of the Sexes exhibition tennis match between Aryna Sabalenka and Nick Kyrgios was unserious, un-fun, and will be weaponised for political purposes. “And a big thank you to aryna sabalenka for setting women’s tennis back 52 years! hope it was worth the cash and the publicity”.
This tweetracked up more than a million views: proof that outrage is still the most reliable accelerant on the internet, but also because it tapped into a discomfort that many people were circling without quite naming. The exhibition “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match played in Dubai on 28 December between Aryna Sabalenka and Nick Kyrgios was packaged as a bit of glossy fun: cheeky, ahistorical, unserious. Just a festive season show.
And yet it landed in a political moment where nothing about sex, sport and bodies is neutral any more. To make the contest palatable, organisers stacked the deck with concessions to Sabalenka. She was given a smaller court.
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She was allowed a faster serve clock. Both players were granted just one serve – which was intended to assist the female player, but ended up helping the male player. Kyrgios won 6-3, 6-3.
These adjustments were presented as sensible equalisation techniques, but they were controversial in themselves, because they implicitly conceded the very premise that the exhibition pretended to mock: that men and women are not physically comparable in elite sport. If the match was meant to be a light-hearted rebuttal to biological essentialism, it did an oddly thorough job of reinscribing it. That alone would have been enough to make the spectacle awkward.
But the organisers chose to dress it up in the borrowed language of one of the most politically loaded sporting events of the 20th century: the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. That comparison is where the Dubai exhibition really begins to creak. Despite the bells and whistles surrounding that 1973 match, and the fact that King entered the court carried in the manner of Cleopatra, King herself never saw her match with Riggs as just a novelty act.
Looking back, she said: “I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn’t win that match. It would ruin the women’s tour and affect all women’s self-esteem.”
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