FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — Post-match speeches for the losers in finals. A fiendish scoring system. At-times ambiguous rules.

Tennis feels designed to cause irritation and aggravation like few other sports, and the handshake at the end of a match is its apex. Two elite athletes, who have spent the previous few hours on a small rectangular battlefield with tensions gradually ratcheting up, are then provided with the perfect incubator for all of those simmering resentments, while being asked to politely say “well done”.

Wednesday at the U.S. Open, Jelena Ostapenko, the tennis player most synonymous with fractious handshakes, furiously confronted Taylor Townsend at the end of their second-round match. Ostapenko, who had just been beaten 7-5, 6-1, told Townsend she should have said sorry for a shot that clipped the top of the net but stayed in play, known as a net cord.

Townsend said she did not have to say sorry before Ostapenko appeared to repeat the phrase “you have no education” three times. Townsend walked away, shook hands with the chair umpire and asked the crowd to make some noise for her win. In her news conference, Townsend said Ostapenko would have to speak for whether or not her quotes were a dog whistle; Ostapenko posted statements on her social media in which she said she had never been a racist and criticized Townsend for behaving inappropriately because she was playing at home.

Despite being an outlier, the handshake altercation exposed the theater of politeness at the heart of one of tennis’ fundamental traditions. After engaging in the sporting equivalent of hand-to-hand combat, players are expected to put aside any emotions they are feeling in a moment of artificial grace broadcast to the world.

Ostapenko’s behavior with Townsend went far beyond her usual handshake protocol, which had until Wednesday become a harmless meme in the tennis world. Eight years ago at this venue, Ostapenko — at the time the French Open champion — introduced herself to the U.S. Open crowd by pointedly looking away from Daria Kasatkina when they shook hands at the end of their second-round match.

“Notice the frost on the fingers,” the broadcaster and former world No 33 Mary Carillo quipped on Tennis Channel.

“Notice the frost on the fingers.” – Mary Carillo
🇷🇺@DKasatkina def. 🇱🇻Jelena #Ostapenko on Day 6.
The post-match handshake? ICY. ❄️#USOpen pic.twitter.com/n16FAW169G

— Tennis Channel (@TennisChannel) September 3, 2017

At the start of 2024, Ostapenko lost to two-time Grand Slam champion Victoria Azarenka of Belarus three times in seven weeks.

The first two were no-look, while on the third occasion, Ostapenko held out her racket rather than her hand, prompting a superb eye-roll from her opponent. “I can’t speak for how she feels and why she does it,” Azarenka said at the time. “Some of her line callings, I mean, it can be a bit comical … that’s just how she is. I don’t necessarily judge. I’m just there to play a match.”

At the time of the Azarenka triptych, Ostapenko’s frostiness appeared partly geopolitical. Ostapenko has Ukrainian family and, at the time, had a Ukrainian doubles partner; Belarus is a supporter of Russia and its ongoing war in Ukraine.

No sport pits Russian and Belarusian athletes against Ukrainians and their allies as regularly as tennis, and none of them have a designated moment of coming together like tennis does. After the invasion in February 2022, players from the warring nations stopped shaking each other’s hands. At Wimbledon in 2023, that policy debuted a year later than at other events, because Wimbledon barred Russian and Belarusian athletes from competing. Fans booed players who refused to shake hands because of this gap, before they slowly became acquainted with what was going on.

“I don’t really see [handshakes] happening because it’s just a terrible, terrible feeling,” Ukraine’s Elina Svitolina said at the Australian Open. “I do not wish for anyone to ever experience this. To wake up to the news of when your friends die on the front line, and being killed by Russian soldiers, it’s something that (is) really, really heavy on my heart.”

“There is a reason behind it,” Ostapenko said of her snubs of Azarenka in an interview last May, before demurring to elaborate on those reasons and evading a direct question about whether it related to Ukraine. Russia’s invasion is the cause of one of the only times at which no handshake is expected at the end of a match.

The seriousness of this situation, and that of Townsend’s with Ostapenko, further underscores the quandary at the heart of the handshake. It is on one level a cursory gesture; on another it is freighted with meaning beyond the scope of two tennis players saying “good match” to each other.

And while Ostapenko may be the face — or palm — of the handshake’s cultural relevance in the sport, the idiosyncrasies go way beyond one player as a result. Townsend said she has experienced handshake aggro previously, referencing a match at the Charlottesville Challenger against Anastasia Rodionova 11 years ago.

“Asia Muhammad actually had to take me off the court because I was so upset,” Townsend said her news conference. “The girl that I played was so disrespectful. There were no ball kids. Girl was slapping balls to the third and fourth court. I have to go walk and get the balls.

“I ended up winning and said some really, like, nasty things. Again, it was one of the things I’m, like — I’m just not going to tolerate disrespect. You’re not going to disrespect me in my face.”

This year has had a steady stream of handshake controversies, most of them in the usual realm of handshake disputes: Gloriously petty. Yulia Putintseva, also known for her at-times tense nature on court, was involved in a scrap with Maria Sakkari in June after losing to the Greek player at the Bad Homburg Open in Germany. Sakkari took exception to Putintseva’s no-look handshake, and after being told to “go f—- herself” said, “f—-ing hell, I’m what?”

Maria Sakkari and Yulia Putintseva got heated during their handshake in Bad Homburg 😳

Watch the full clip here and read more from @Tennis below 👇 https://t.co/Xi8KegqHOu pic.twitter.com/wvS84NILKu

— Tennis Channel (@TennisChannel) June 22, 2025

On the men’s side, world No 3 Alexander Zverev could barely look rising French star Arthur Fils after the Hamburg Open final, which Fils won. Zverev, who lost the match, then said at the Australian Open: “I think Hamburg against Arthur the handshake wasn’t great from my side. I didn’t like some of the things that, yeah, happened in the match. Everybody thought it was the underarm serve or something like that. It wasn’t the underarm serve. It was more the checking of the marks, really doubting me as a sportsman, fairness. That was kind of a moment.

“Also in the end I realized that it was kind of more my mistake that the handshake happened like that.”

A couple of months later, Fils and Stefanos Tsitsipas had a testy handshake following an incident in which Tsitsipas smashed a passing shot at Fils’ body from close range — a legal tactic, but frowned upon. A common denominator in these confrontations is the way in which a small incident can build up in players’ minds over the course of a match, before spilling over at the handshake, often inflated far beyond its actual significance.

At the Madrid Open in April, after an earlier dispute over an underarm serve, there was the odd sight of Damir Dzhumur going to shake Mattia Belucci’s hand, the latter refusing it, then going back in for the handshake, which was in turn refused by Dzhumur.

“When he moved his hand there is no way I would give you another hand because I’m not a fool,” Dzhumur said in an interview afterwards.

Some players fall foul of the forced niceties of handshake convention despite not doing anything out of turn. The Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen, who is currently out injured, has developed a reputation for unfriendly handshakes, but is straightforward about why.

“If I lost, I will give you just a basic respect and that’s it,” she said at a news conference in January. “That’s why you will not see me lose one match with a happy face to the opponent.” She added, with a laugh: “If you saw that on me, that is very strange, which means I don’t care about that match on that day.”

This is another of the fundamentals of the handshake: it is an accord of respect which has been pushed beyond its basic requirement of acknowledging that a tennis match has taken place. Zheng even forgot to shake hands with Aryna Sabalenka at the WTA Tour Finals in November, something Tsitsipas did too after beating Jan-Lennard Struff at the Madrid Open in April. Competition can be so absorbing that the requirement to shake hands can get lost, showcasing its essential unimportance in the grand scheme of a match — and the oversized attention paid to it — as well as the way it masks the brutal realities of elite individual sport.

Still, players don’t mind the handshake convention. But they don’t mind the conflict it sometimes causes either. Frances Tiafoe said Wednesday after the Townsend-Ostapenko incident that: “If there’s a situation that needs to be had and spoken about, why not talk about it? You know, if you’re that p—ed, then sit here and talk about it.

“Man, I get it. It’s heat of the battle, man. You’re playing for livelihood. You’re trying to move forward. Money, all these other things.

“You are heated sometimes, and your opponent might be on whatever, and you just somehow you’ve got to figure it out. This guy has got to see me.”

Daniil Medvedev, himself no stranger to controversy, including being given a $42,500 fine this week for his antics against Benjamin Bonzi Sunday night, said in January that he thinks tennis players should be “a bit more open” to cold handshakes.

“I can understand some people when they lose, you’re frustrated, you don’t want to smile at your opponent that just beat you.”

Spain’s Paula Badosa said during an interview in January that all the talk of handshakes amounts to “bull—.”

“Sometimes you have to be like, ‘hey, she’s still my friend.’ And in that moment, you don’t feel it. Of course, you don’t feel it, but when everything cools down, you’re OK again. But in that moment, it’s tough. And I understand when there’s a cold handshake and then when there’s a nice, a beautiful hug. So it’s very emotional,” Badosa said.

For Townsend, the Ostapenko incident plays out along a binary of its own. It was disrespectful, confronting and unpleasant. But it was also something, she said, that she could put on her TikTok and leave in the past. The spectacle of the handshake, this piece of tennis stagecraft that distills hours of intense competition into two hands clasped together, is likely to endure far longer.

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic)