A protester lit a portion of the court docket and his arm on fireplace throughout a match on the Laver Cup tennis occasion Friday, hours earlier than Roger Federer was scheduled to play for the ultimate time earlier than retiring.
The episode briefly delayed the motion at first of the second set of Stefanos Tsitsipas' 6-2, 6-1 victory for Group Europe over Diego Schwartzman of Group World on the O2 Area.
The activist, carrying a lighter and sporting a white T-shirt with a message about personal jets, made his manner onto the black court docket and sat down close to the web. The particular person ultimately was carried away by safety guards.
"It got here out of nowhere. ... I by no means had an incident like this occur on court docket," Tsitsipas, the runner-up on the 2021 French Open, stated afterward. "I hope he is all proper."
Tsitsipas spoke to the chair umpire to verify it might be secure to proceed to play and requested that a mark left on the court docket be cleaned up.
The protester "has been arrested and the state of affairs is being dealt with by the police," Laver Cup organizers stated in a press release.
Federer, a 20-time Grand Slam champion, was slated to compete later Friday, teaming up with longtime rival Rafael Nadal in a doubles match.
The 41-year-old Federer hasn't performed an official match since Wimbledon in July 2021 and is ending his enjoying profession after a collection of operations on his proper knee.
There have been different situations of high-profile tennis matches being interrupted in recent times, together with through the 2009 ultimate at Roland Garros, when a person went as much as Federer and tried to place a hat on his head.
At this yr's French Open, in June, a protester sporting a T-shirt with the message "We've got 1028 days left" interrupted the lads's semifinal between Casper Ruud and 2014 U.S. Open champion Marin Cilic by attaching herself to the web with steel wires and glue and kneeling on the court docket.