Sun Yingsha Asks for Quiet as Crowd Interference Dogs China's Big Sports Events

At two arenas on opposite sides of Beijing this week, Chinese sport spent the Golden Week holiday playing against the same opponent: its own crowds.

At the WTT China Smash, staged at the Shougang park in the city's west, Sun Yingsha beat Ye Yitian 3-1 in her opening women's singles match — her first win since returning to world No. 1 — only to spend her post-match interview on the spectators. "The crowd was very warm, but there were still camera flashes and shouting at the wrong moments," she said, asking fans to follow the rules a little better in the rounds ahead. She had already made the point on court: when the umpire called a fault against one of her serves, she challenged it, and the hawk-eye replay proved the serve clean — what fan posts called a textbook unobstructed serve, delivered by the player who has spent years pleading for the stands to let her serve in peace.

She is not the only one pleading. At the China Open on the city's north side, 16-year-old wildcard Sun Xinran — the reigning US Open junior champion and junior world No. 1, who had never won a tour-level match before this fortnight — took third seed Coco Gauff to the wire in the first set. Sun, who had already beaten a seeded opponent in round two, led 3-2 with a break; late in the set, a camera flash went off from the courtside boards just as Gauff struck the ball. The umpire reviewed the incident and ordered the point replayed. Sun's rhythm broke; she double-faulted, dropped the set 5-7 and wept in her chair. She lost 5-7, 1-6.

Weibo split into two camps overnight. Some fans accused Gauff of gamesmanship for raising the flash after losing the point — one post complained that a Grand Slam champion was using such tricks against a 16-year-old. Others pointed out that Gauff had applauded Sun's running passing shot earlier in the match. Sun herself declined the grievance in her post-match interview: the tears, she said, were about chances missed. "I had my opportunities on the key points and didn't take them — that was the mindset wobble, watching the chance slip away."

The week's starkest sanction came in the same arena's men's draw. In the semi-final, Daniil Medvedev struck a ball away while the point was dead and hit a spectator, who left the stands for medical treatment; with Novak Djokovic leading 7-5, 5-3, the Russian was defaulted on the spot. Djokovic advanced to the final, where the fifth seed Alex de Minaur awaits.

The argument underneath the scores is about who owns the stands. Fan bloggers on Weibo have pushed back on the idea that athletes should do the policing: keeping order in the arena "is the job of the event staff, not an obligation of the athletes", one widely shared post argued, calling on organisers to enforce the rules spectators agree to when they buy a ticket. It is a genre of incident familiar from Chinese sport's boom — crowds that learned fandom from entertainment, where noise is devotion, discovering that tennis and table tennis run on silence between points. Zheng Qinwen, who ground through a third straight three-setter to reach the round of 16, has played in the same atmosphere all week.

The China Open runs until October 11. The question the holiday has left hanging is the one the athletes keep asking and no one has yet answered: who, exactly, is going to enforce the rules in the stands.