Many tennis players travel the circuit with a psychologist as part of their support team. Their role is to provide mental uplift, to gee the player up ahead of competition and, equally important, in times of crisis, to calm them down. It seems the British No 4 Harriet Dart could use a bit of such therapy. Well, at least some aromatherapy.
In her match against the French player Lois Boisson at the Rouen Open this week, Dart complained to the umpire about her opponent’s air. It was not, she reckoned, entirely wholesome.
“Can you ask her to put on deodorant?” Dart was picked up by the courtside microphone asking the chair during a break of play. “She smells really bad.”
This was a first in tennis. Players have been known to complain to the official about their opponent’s grunting, about their rival firing a ball at their head, or, in Nick Kygrios’s case, about the sobriety of a spectator. But never before has anyone uttered a grievance about personal hygiene. Not least because, while it might involve intensely physical and sweat-producing activity, this is a sport in which the players spend most of their time at least 80 feet apart at opposite ends of the court. You would have to own a particularly sensitive nose to pick up any unpleasant output at that distance.
Indeed, compared to other sports, tennis barely merits a place in the odour top 10. In ice hockey, for instance, the inevitability of getting warm in a cold place while wearing large amounts of kit invariably gives the dressing room after a game a ripe whiff. In rugby, it is not unheard of for a prop, invoking the dark arts of the front row, to consume improbable amounts of garlic the night before a game, to get right up their opposite number’s nose. Wrestling, too, with its obligation to put the head in close proximity to the most intimate parts of an opponent, is not for the faint-nosed. As for the gym, all that working out in an enclosed space in kit that may not have been near a washing machine for several months, can make the atmosphere close to intolerable.
But tennis? The other player’s relationship with the shower is not really an issue. Which made Dart’s outburst all the more odd. Though given it was delivered midway through a 6-0, 6-3 defeat by a player who had come through the qualifiers, it was not so much odd as childish, petulant and sulky. This was the most schoolgirlish complaint “Miss, she smells, err”.
Not that her opponent was unduly bothered. Boisson, perhaps bolstered by unexpected victory, took the insult in good part. She may not have heard it on court, but she was quickly made aware of it afterwards, and posted on social media a picture of herself in the dressing room holding some antiperspirant, with the caption “@Dove apparently need a collab.” A smart move. Not only did she look humorous and magnanimous, she was seizing the opportunity to court a sponsor.
As for Dart, she was quick to back down.
“Hey everyone, I want to apologise for what I said on court today, it was a heat-of-the-moment comment that I truly regret,” she wrote on the sportperson’s preferred vehicle of communication, Instagram.
It was a wise thing to do. And clearly the next time the heat of the moment gets a little too warm for her, she would be advised to apply some verbal roll-on.
Dart’s previous flashpoints
June 2023: Nottingham Open quarter-finals vs Boulter
A 6-3, 7-5 win for Boulter on her way to winning her first WTA title came to a dramatic head at the net. Dart took visible issue with Boulter’s celebration – a single finger to the temples previously seen done by Stan Wawrinka, the former French Open champion, and popularised in recent years by Marcus Rashford, the Aston Villa forward.
After a match in which Dart had called out her complaints at line decisions, a bitterly cold handshake highlighted the pair’s rivalry. “I thought you were doing it towards me,” she said over the net, before accusing: “It’s not professional.”
This was in Nottingham, when Harriet Dart took offence to Katie Boulters match winning celebrations… “it’s not professional and you do it all the time.”
At Wimbledon in the summer, Dart started crying in the final set tiebreak against Boulter too. 👀pic.twitter.com/FKrIIVYQq5
— Pavvy G (@pavyg) April 16, 2025
June 2024: Nottingham Open first round vs Boulter
Another match-up between the pair and another loss for Dart in a three-hour marathon made headlines when she accused the chair umpire of “embarrassing herself” in her line decisions.
With no Hawk-Eye in place, umpire Kelly Rask was the subject of continuous criticisms from Dart’s corner, who demonstrated to the crowd where she felt Boulter’s shots were landing. “If we watch that back, I can promise you, I would back £50,000 that ball is out, I’d shake your hand now. It’s a joke,” Dart said.
Upon asking to speak to the tournament referee, she continued: “I said a call was ‘embarrassing’. I’m not sure how you can get a code violation from that. Ninety-five per cent I’m right on Hawk-Eye, you should check my record.”
July 2024: Wimbledon second round vs Boulter
Wimbledon 2024 was emotional for Dart. When she was 6-2 down in the final-set tie-break against Boulter and facing another defeat by her compatriot, Dart was fighting back on-court tears. Yet in a series of rallies riddled with unforced errors, Boulter’s lead slipped; Dart earned a 4-6, 6-1, 7-6 (10-8) victory, as visible in her exhausted joy as her despair moments before.
“My head-to-head is absolutely woeful against her, so I wasn’t expecting too much. And even though I was down in that tie-break I just thought, ‘Give it everything.’ I let things kind of get to me a little bit.”
Mid-match tears continued in the next round, albeit with a different fate. Dart let a lead slip against Wang Xinyu in the third round, crashing out in a 2-6, 7-5, 6-3 defeat.
January 2025: Australian Open second round vs Donna Vekic
Her vocality is not limited to her opponents and referees. In her second-round defeat in this year’s Australian Open, she criticised the tournament’s rowdier atmosphere. “I felt like I was at a football match,” she said. “It’s great to have lots of people watching but I also think there has to be respect towards both players.”