"All the top players" will participate in the Australian Open, including Roger Federer, tournament director and Tennis Australia boss Craig Tiley says.
Roger Federer will return again as planned, in his comeback from a knee operation that saw him skip most of this season, leading the men's Grand Slam race by just one title with 20 majors.
Serena Williams, too, will travel to Melbourne, still trying to equal the women's record of 24 majors after missing out at the US and French Opens.
"Roger this morning just confirmed publicly, Roger Federer, that he'll be here," Tiley said on Sports Sunday.
"Serena Williams will be here, obviously trying to get Margaret Court's record. We're excited about the players that will be here and about what we'll put on."
Tiley said that the ongoing Roland Garros event had buoyed confidence for the Australian Open. The French Open has featured small crowds despite France's far higher COVID-19 rates, after the US Open had to be played behind closed doors.
Tiley hopes for crowds of between 25 and 50 per cent of capacity at Melbourne Park. And he is adamant that all the big-name players will attend the January tournament.
"We will [have them] ... we've been talking to them every single week," Tiley said.
"In fact, on Friday night, we were on a call with all the women players, going through what it's going to mean.
"We're going to have six weeks of tennis. In fact, we're going to have more tennis, more events than we've ever had before.
"We're going to start around the middle of December, when all the players will come in. There'll be two weeks of quarantine that they'll do in cities around Australia and then those two weeks, we're creating a bubble where they'll be able to be in it from the hotel to the courts, in a training environment; not dissimilar to what's happened with the AFL and the NRL.
"Then once they get out of those two weeks, by then, we expect the borders to be completely open. Move from city to city, then come down to Melbourne for the Australian Open in the last two weeks of January.
"There's going to be more events, more tennis for people to watch across not only Australia, but around the world. Our goal is to continue to get more people watching; we had over a billion people watching in 2020 and we plan on doing the same in 2021."
The Kooyong Classic exhibition event was cancelled for 2021, due to concerns about COVID-19 in Victoria, but blockbuster events like the ATP Cup will headline the summer of tennis alongside the Australian Open.
Australian stars Ash Barty and Nick Kyrgios have skipped most of this year due to COVID-19 but intend to return for their home major. Men's ace Alex de Minaur will hope for a big performance in Melbourne after reaching the quarter-finals of the US Open, losing to eventual champion Dominic Thiem in the other hard-court Grand Slam.
from WWOS https://wwos.nine.com.au/tennis/australian-open-players-roger-federer-craig-tiley/93fe4519-55cf-452f-a012-00d6371cdb5f
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