The protesters appear incapable of grasping the fact that they are spoiling what is, for many, a precious moment, anticipated for months. But all were thoroughly fed up here by the disfiguring of their well-earned fun. Most are so well-mannered that they would need persuading even to write a strongly worded letter. Not that you could ever imagine Wimbledon-goers staging a riot. As if paying customers were not affronted already by the hiatus in Grigor Dimitrov’s victory, they were near-mutinous by the time another transgressor had his five seconds of fame, tossing more handfuls of ticker-tape around like the world’s least welcome confetti-thrower. For those who had waited patiently in the morning rain wanted some joy for their grounds passes, not the bleak pantomime of seeing officials trying to shift jigsaw pieces with leaf-blowers.Įspecially not when it happened twice in one day. That proportion threatens to mushroom after the movement’s foot soldiers gatecrashed the sacred acres of SW19. It is an impeccable bellwether of middle England, this tournament, and once again the prevailing sentiment of spectators mirrored that of the nation.Īfter Edred Whittingham, a student at Exeter, had carpeted the green baize at the Crucible in April with garish orange dust, surveys indicated that a majority in the country held an unfavourable opinion of Just Stop Oil. The reaction was one of grim fury, with cries of “Oh no, not again” and “Get them out of here”. The crowd on Court 18 did not sound, after having their afternoon’s entertainment so rudely interrupted by the eco-zealots, as if they were in any mood to reconsider a flight to New Zealand or buy shares in Tesla. And this is the problem for Just Stop Oil: after their third foray in three months into a cherished British sporting event, their incursions are greeted with neither alarm nor horror, but plain contempt. The moral of the tale is that a stunt never has the same shock value the second time around. Where Johnson had left beaten finalist MaliVai Washington “flustered”, all Roberts received was a short spell in Wimbledon police station for his trouble. John McEnroe called for “replays from all angles”, while Peter Seddon observed in his book Tennis’s Strangest Matches how “17-year-old Lord Frederick Windsor looked as if he hadn’t enjoyed a tennis match so much in years – and the knock-up hadn’t even begun”.īut six years later, self-proclaimed “professional streaker” Mark Roberts copied Johnson’s loose interpretation of the dress code and found himself an instant footnote. When Melissa Johnson, a 23-year-old waitress, became the first person to run across Centre Court naked during the 1996 men’s final, the reaction was less one of horror than thinly concealed approval. Once, there was a jolting novelty to the act, but now it is all a little low-rent and predictable. Increasingly, the Just Stop Oil agitators are morphing into the streakers of our age. Mind you, it was a Wimbledon special-edition jigsaw, so at least the club shop extracted some extra cash from them first. It was as if, to protect the delicate sensibilities of daytime viewers, the production team decided not to broadcast the faintly pitiful spectacle of activists scattering orange ticker-tape across the grass from a 1,000-piece jigsaw box. No sooner had two incorrigible attention-seekers frolicked on to Court 18 than the BBC cameras panned discreetly away.
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