Two-time Australian Open champion Victoria Azarenka says being stuck for two weeks in a Melbourne hotel room with windows that wouldn’t open “really took a toll” in the leadup to the year’s first Grand Slam tournament. She was among the more than 70 players forced to stay put with zero opportunity to go anywhere at all because they might have been exposed to the coronavirus on their flights to Australia. Azarenka lost her first-round match. Other players who exited the tournament after a hard quarantine described dealing with hand blisters and bodies so sore they couldn’t walk.
