Aryna Sabalenka has dealt with hostile crowds, swirling winds and Grand Slam pressure. On Friday in New York, she had to deal with something else: a thick cloud of cannabis drifting across Louis Armstrong Stadium.
The world No 1 was cruising in her US Open third-round match against Uzbekistan’s Kamilla Rakhimova, racing out to a 3-0 lead and never looking troubled in a straight-sets win. Yet midway through her second service game, the rhythm broke.
She paused on the baseline, wrinkled her nose and walked toward the chair.
“Someone is smoking weed,” she told umpire Eva Asderaki-Moore at 30-0. “Would you mind to… because it’s so strong.”
Play resumed quickly, Sabalenka locked back in and finished the job with the authority expected of the top seed. The smell, though, lingered — and not just in the stadium.
In her press conference, Sabalenka made it clear she was not trying to police anyone’s evening in Queens, only the airspace around her workplace.
“I was like, Guys, you can do whatever, you can smoke whatever, you can relax as much as you can,” she said with a smile. “But please do not do it around the tennis courts. It’s a bit tricky to handle that smell while you’re trying to compete at your best.”
This is not a one-off quirk of a single night session. The odour of cannabis has become a recurring, unwelcome subplot at Flushing Meadows in recent years, with several players remarking on how distracting it can be during matches.
The rules are clear inside the gates: smoking is not allowed on the grounds of the US Open. Outside them, the picture changes. Recreational cannabis is legal in New York for adults 21 and over, and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park wraps around the tennis complex. When the breeze picks up, so does the problem.
On Friday, the wind did its part.
“That strong, yeah. Also, because it was a bit windy,” Sabalenka said. “I don’t know if it was coming from the crowd or was from the outside because the wind blows it into the stadium.”
She has caught the smell around the site before, but rarely with this intensity in the middle of a match. This time, it was enough to halt her serve and prompt a polite intervention.
“I just hope they are a bit more aware of that stuff,” she added, before laughing as the questions kept circling back to the same topic. “Come on, guys. I think there is nothing else to say about weed. I’m just asking people not to smoke it next to the tennis court.”
The tennis took care of itself. Sabalenka moved through with the kind of clean, controlled performance that underlines why she arrived in New York as the player to beat.
The bigger question now sits with the tournament: in a city where the law has changed and the park is on the doorstep, how do you keep the haze from drifting into the heart of a Grand Slam?
