By Ranamita Chakraborty
While the cancelled Wimbledon event had a pandemic insurance policy in place this year to take care of its financial losses, its 2021 tournament will not be covered according to All England Club CEO Richard Lewis as reported by UK newspaper The Metro.
All England Club is the organiser of the annual Wimbledon tennis tournament which was scheduled to be held on 29 June but was postponed to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Wimbledon was the first major sports event to be cancelled and several other major sporting events, including Tokyo 2020 Olympics, have been postponed until 2021.
According to Mr Lewis, the event will not be in the same position next year if it is called off again because it is impossible to get pandemic insurance in the current climate.
He said, “What I would say about the future though is that when I first started in 2012, there were some signs that things were not insurable, because of communicable diseases that had taken place like SARS and swine ‘flu.
“In the immediate aftermath you can’t get insurance but fairly soon after that, you can start to get insurance again, the market returns. So there won’t be insurance next year, but I think in the medium term, just because we have made one claim it won’t affect us in the long term.”
There is speculation around the amount of insurance pay out and how much of the event’s annual surplus will be covered.
However, Mr Lewis said his organisation does not know the figures yet. According to him, it will take two or three months to work through the rest of the insurance claim and also to deal with the final numbers.
“But I am optimistic that the surplus will be pretty well protected and therefore the impact – nobody wants to cancel, nobody wants to make an insurance claim – but the impact will be somewhat minimised,” he said.
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