hree climate change protestors disrupted the US Open women’s semi-finals on Friday causing a 45minute delay after one glued his bare feet to the ground.
The trio, wearing End Fossil Fuels T-shirts, caused play to be halted in the first semi-final between Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova as they started chanting “end fossil fuels”.
Two were quickly ejected but a third had glued his feet to the ground, which resulted in the players being escorted off court as New York police officers worked to free the protestor’s feet.
Following the disruption, crowd favourite Gauff went on to seal a 6-4, 7-5 victory over Muchova and booked her place in Saturday’s final, her second grand slam final after last year’s French Open.
She will face either Aryna Sabalenka or countrywoman Madison Keys who were playing in the latter semi-final.
Afterwards, Gauff said she had predicted there would be a climate change protest but not until the weekend’s finals.
She said: “This morning, I told myself, I bet there’s going to be a climate change protest in the final. I didn’t think it was going to be in the semi-final. Immediately when it happened, I said it’s a protest. Something this morning told me it was going to happen this weekend.
“I treated it like a rain delay. The only thing was harder was we had to leave the court and the security guy said it could be five minutes or an hour.”
Following the incident, US Open boss Stacey Allaster said of the protestors: “There were three. Two of them were removed, they quietly left without further protest. When security got there, they found that one of the protesters had physically glued themselves in their bare feet to the cement floor.”
Gauff had been comfortably in control of the match racing into a 5-1 lead before Muchova, who had struggled early on, finally forced her way back into the contest only for the American to seal the set.
Just one game into the second set, the disruption happened, leading to the lengthy delay much to the chagrin of a booing crowd on Arthur Ashe Stadium.
It proved a far tighter contest on the resumption of play as Muchova threatened to pull off an upset in front of a partisan crowd.
The penultimate point of the match was a 40-point rally, which Gauff won to give her a match point which she duly converted.
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