The official presentation of the ATP250 Mallorca Championships took place this week. The tennis tournament will be held from the 18th to the 25th of June and will once again bring the island to the forefront of world sport. The courts of the Mallorca Country Club will welcome for the second consecutive year the best players in the world and five of the world’s top 20 have already confirmed their presence. Institutional representatives such as Catalina Cladera, President of the Consell Insular de Mallorca; Iago Negueruela, Conseller de Model Econòmic, Turisme i Treball. Alfonso Rodríguez, Mayor of Calvià; Edwin Weindorfer, CEO and founder of e|motion group; and Pilar Carbonell, director of e|motion Sports Hispania have participated in the presentation.

Toni Nadal, tournament director, announced: “Feliciano Lopez has received an invitation to play the tournament in Mallorca. We are happy to receive every year a line-up of very good players. Probably because of the quality of our grass courts, but fortunately the island is already distinguished by its beauty.” Feliciano, famous for being an expert on grass, returns to Mallorca where last year he achieved his 500th victory on the ATP circuit.

The official presentation of the Mallorca Championships 2022 held at the Parc de la Mar in Palma.

Sustainability as a main element of the event

Tennis has been the central theme of the presentation, but not the only one, since “we will have the best players in the world, but the ATP250 Mallorca Championships is much more than a tennis tournament,” said Edwin Weindorfer, “we want to be an event of reference for Calvià and the whole island, which is why this year we wanted to go a step further in sustainability.”

In this regard, the tournament presented the Austrian hydration brand waterdrop® as one of the main sponsors of the event. For the tournament a key sustainable partnership as the brand’s goal is to encourage people to drink more water and in a sustainable way.  To this end, waterdrop® will provide the Mallorca Championships with smart hydration benches for the players on the court, but also with innovative hydration solutions, including hydration stations and bar for the public. In addition, the tournament and waterdrop® will donate 1 euro to the Mallorca Preservation Fund for every refillable bottle purchased at the tournament. It is expected that with the sale of these bottles, the tournament will save the use of more than 50,000 plastic bottles during the event. “Our mission is to inspire people around the world to drink more water sustainably. We develop eco-friendly solutions to promote responsible tap water consumption and avoid bottling and shipping unsustainable and mostly unhealthy beverages,” added Martin Murray, CEO and founder of waterdrop®.

Another new feature this year in terms of sustainability is in the recycling of the tennis balls that will be used during the tournament. In Spain, more than 19 million tennis balls are used annually, which are usually disposed in the trash and will take more than 100 years to decompose. Thanks to GreenBall, the tournament seeks to raise awareness of this problem by recycling and converting into energy more than 1,000 balls that will be used during the tournament.

Mallorca Championships Opening Gala

Under the slogan, “Much more than a tennis tournament”, the opening ceremony of the tournament will be held on Friday, June 17. The kick-off of the tournament will consist, as last year, of an exhibition match and a VIP Gala afterwards. The exhibition will be attended by Tommy Haas among other tennis legends, but it will not be just another match, all proceeds from ticket sales will go to the “Tennis Plays for Peace” program that ATP created with the idea of helping the Ukrainian people. The Mallorca Championships does not forget the hard situation Ukraine is going through. The tournament proudly announces that our partner entradas.com will donate to the Ukrainian people all the management fees from the ticket sales of the event. “From Eventim Spain, we would like to thank the tournament and the ATP for launching this initiative, we are delighted to contribute our bit to actions that contribute to improve, as far as possible, the humanitarian situation we are facing.”

Massimo Calvelli, ATP Director General, expressed his delight at the initiative and said, “We are delighted that the Mallorca Championships is supporting our Tennis Plays for Peace initiative in support of the tour’s humanitarian relief efforts in Ukraine. Over $1.1 million has been raised so far, and we would like to thank the Mallorca tournament organizers for this valuable contribution to our collective efforts. We wish the best to all involved in the Mallorca Championships, in what will undoubtedly be another successful tournament.”

Institutional support

Mallorca and especially Calvià will once again have a world-class men’s tennis event. The president of the Consell Insular de Mallorca Catalina Cladera highlighted in the presentation: “We are pleased that Mallorca is, with an event in the municipality of Calvià, the epicenter of world tennis with the best players, thus putting the island on the international map of the sport”.

On the other hand, Iago Negueruela, Regional Councilor of Economic Model, Tourism and Employment, pointed out that “the public-private initiatives are of vital importance in the bet of a destination to transform itself, based also on the media impact that the event will have with an international sporting event of such characteristics. Thanks to e|motion group that last year, in such a complex moment, took a risk and was vital, betting on the tournament and the initiative (…) this trust must also be supported by the institutions.”

Finally, the mayor of Calvià, Alfonso Rodríguez Badal, thanked the organization and the rest of the Public Administrations for betting, once again, for Calvià, to celebrate a tournament that “has a seal of quality, and it is in these quality products that the administrations have to focus on.” The mayor added that it will be a few days in which “we will talk about how extraordinary are our destinations, Calvià and Mallorca, to practice sports. An opportunity, undoubtedly, for Calvià to show itself as the quality destination it is.”