The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the cancellation of the 2020 Wimbledon Championship tennis tournament, officially making the novel coronavirus as bad as Hitler.
On Wednesday, the All England Club (AELTC) announced that it was officially cancelling this year’s Wimbledon event “due to public health concerns linked to the coronavirus epidemic.” The 134th Wimbledon will instead be staged from June 28 to July 11, 2021.
The original plan was to postpone the event until later this summer but the UK government’s increasingly dire forecasts and Tuesday’s one-day death toll of 563 quashed those ideas. AELTC chairman Ian Hewitt noted that it usually took a World War to result in Wimbledon’s cancellation, so Britons will likely find some way to blame this on Boris Becker or Steffi Graf.
Wimbledon’s absence will leave yet another giant hole on bookmakers’ calendar, and more holes may appear if other Grand Slam events such as the French Open (currently delayed to September) and the US Open (holding firm for the moment for late August) follow Wimbledon’s lead.