It’s not been the best year at Wimbledon for Britain. Fifteen of our players crashed out of The Championships in the first round, 10 of them falling in the space of just 10 hours.
But we do have at least one British tennis champ to celebrate. Here Charlotte Henry speaks to Naqi Rizvi – the world number one in blind tennis…
Naqi Rizvi was always a sports fan. However, he was born with a devastating rare eye condition called congenital glaucoma. By seven-years-old, he could not see at all.
“So, growing up I didn’t really have many sporting opportunities,” he says. It must have been a surprise to become the undisputed world champ in blind tennis, dominating the game for the last decade.
“It’s been an amazing journey,” the 35-year-old tells The Daily Star. “It gets harder every year in some ways because you’re the target for everybody else. But it’s an amazing experience as well.”
It all started when an organisation, called Metro Blind Sports, introduced him to various games that could be adapted for those with visual impairments. It was tennis that clicked.
Rizvi was 25 – a veteran in tennis terms – by the time he got serious about the game. But he still worked his way through regional and national tournaments, before reaching the international stage.
“Obviously I wasn’t particularly good ’cause at this point I was still trying to hone my skills,” the Londoner says, somewhat unconvincingly.
But the game is still less widely known than many disabled sports. Of the Grand Slams – tennis’s four biggest tournaments – only the Aussie Open has worked to include it.
This year, they introduce a “showdown” format for visually impaired players, rather than a traditional knock-out competition. Rizvi, of course, won.
He is now urging Wimbledon, the US and French Opens and the Paralympics to include blind tennis, in a bid to grow the game he loves and give it the same status as wheelchair tennis.
While he is keen “to commend Tennis Australia and the Australian Open for what they did,” Rizvi refuses to call himself Aussie Open Champion. That’s not just because his competition had a different format, either. “Give me the prize money for it and then yes,” he says.
It’s the lack of money that makes it so hard players to come through and build on Rizvi’s incredible success. With funding and access for Visually Impaired tennis almost non-existent, the world no.1 himself still needs a 9-to-5 job in financial services to make ends meet.
“Even when I won the World Champs, when I won the World Games, all the UK nationals that I’ve won, I haven’t won a single penny,” he reveals.
The Importance of Getting Active
Very few make it to the level Rizvi has, but playing sport and being active is crucial for everyone. Of course, it is particularly difficult for blind people and those with other disabilities to do this as much as they might like.
“You do see, sadly, a lot of inactivity or sedentary lifestyle in people with disabilities,” reflects Rizvi. “It’s not just about the exercise element,” he notes, adding later that exercise “doesn’t just impact your physical wellbeing, it impacts your mental wellbeing as well.”
Rizvi knows all about this. He confides that during the Covid pandemic he “felt incredibly miserable because the government said, you can do your one form of exercise outside as long as you’re alone and all that. I can’t really do that ’cause even for a run and for a cycle I need to go out with someone.”
End the Elitism
Getting more people active and onto the court is also what drives Chris Marshall. He is a tennis coach and runs a charity called Young Champs, trying to get more people from all backgrounds involved in tennis. Rizvi serves as an ambassador for the group.
They may have their separate agendas, but both men want to “promote inclusive tennis and highlight that tennis isn’t always very affordable,” says Marshall.
He speaks warmly of a young athlete he is working with, called Sabein, who is 12 years old and has been playing for the last six. Coming from a London estate, not the usual posh tennis club background, getting access to the coaching and competition she needs to progress has been difficult.
“There’s just such a small pool of kids who have that chance of getting through and have any chance of getting to the top,” says Marshall. He is running a campaign called ACE, A Chance for Everyone, encouraging clubs to work with players from all parts of the community.
Both Marshall and Rizvi want to see barriers to the game love broken down, whether those are to do with money or disability. And they warn if their cause is neglected, Britain will keep going backwards in the tennis world.
For example, at the 2019 International Blind Tennis Tournament, Brits won six golds out of eight. But come 2024, says Rizvi, that was “zero golds, zero silver medals.”
He adds: “Other countries have kept up that that momentum and have really, really accelerated what they’re doing in that VI tennis space. I think unless we can get our act together quickly, we’re only going to keep getting further behind.”