Spain power outage: British tennis ace Fearnley’s Madrid match abandoned
British tennis player Jacob Fearnley was forced off court at a crucial stage of his match at the Madrid Open due to the huge power outage that hit Spain on Monday.
Fearnley was trailing Grigor Dimitrov 6-4 5-4, having just saved match point and broken the former world No3 to stay in the third-round contest, when play was suspended in the capital.
Tournament organisers later abandoned play for both day and night sessions “in order to guarantee general safety”, meaning British No2 Fearnley and Dimitrov are set to resume their match on Tuesday if power has been restored.
It came as the outage, which was blamed on freak weather conditions, caused chaos across Spain, Portugal and some parts of southern France.
The power cut affected scoreboards and the electronic line calling system that has replaced human judges at the Madrid Open.
The position of the camera when the outage struck meant the match could not continue even with line judges as it was stuck in the players’ eyeline and, after remaining on court for some time, the pair were taken off.
Spain’s grid operator Red Electrica said fixing the issue, which grounded some flights and halted train and metro services, would have to be done in stages.
“This process involves the gradual energization of the transmission grid as the generating units are connected,” the company added. We continue working to restore power.”
Portuguese grid operator REN blamed the outage on a fault in the Spanish system caused by a “rare atmospheric phenomenon”.
It added: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines, a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
Fearnley, 23, is in only his second season on the ATP Tour, having rocketed more than 600 places up the rankings to crash the top 100 last year.
He reached the third round of the Australian Open and made his debut for the Great Britain Davis Cup team earlier this year.
Other high-profile sporting events in Spain this week include Wednesday’s Champions League semi-final first leg between Barcelona and Inter Milan.