An international wheelchair tennis event has been forced to move because the show court at a new $16m tennis complex has been built on a slope.
The Darwin International Tennis Centre is set to stage the Arafura Games later this month, but wheelchair competitors have been relegated to one of its 14 outside courts.
The new centre, in the suburb of Marrara, was completed in May 2018 at a total cost of $16.7m, more than $16m of which was pledged by the Northern Territory government, with additional funding coming from Tennis Australia and Tennis NT.
Construction took a year, but it was not long before a major problem became apparent: the centre court had a 49.5cm slope from one side to the other.
An incline of that size contravenes International Tennis Federation guidelines, meaning no officially-sanctioned events can be played until the slope is levelled.
Tennis NT had received assurances those guidelines would be met and at the time of its unveiling, the former world No 53, Sam Groth, who helped launch the complex, said he hoped the “state of the art facility” would attract more events such as the Davis Cup and Fed Cup to Darwin.
But gradually the court sunk into ground, leaving it unfit for the wheelchair component at the upcoming Arafura Games, a biannual multi-sport event where athletes with a disability compete alongside able-bodied athletes.
Able-bodied tennis players will be allowed to play on the centre court at the Games as, unlike the wheelchair event, it is not an ITF-sanctioned event.
This year, the Games feature local and international athletes from 33 countries playing a total of 17 sports, including dragon boating, Muay Thai boxing, netball and sepak takraw, alongside more traditional Olympic sports.
The slope is believed to be fixable, but there are no firm plans in place at the moment for remedial work to start.
Tennis NT said assurances from project managers that the problem would be addressed by early 2019 have not come to fruition and it is now reluctant to interrupt a busy upcoming schedule, which includes the week-long Games, beginning on 26 April, and several ITF tournaments in the following months.
The ITF and Australian ranking points events will continue as planned – just not on centre court – and the start to any works has been put back to at least the start of October.
Even then, there remains uncertainty about who will foot the bill. The NT government refuses to pump more money into the project, but both Tennis NT, which says it does not expect any more tax payer dollars to be spent, and the project managers have said they are committed to rectifying the situation.