13. March 2026
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The Whoopgate – My Thoughts about Wearables in Sports

Florian Buechtingby Florian Buechting

Christiano Ronaldo uses it. Rory McIlroy has one as well. And since this week latest, we also know that tennis players like Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner or Aryna Sabalenka use it as well. I am talking about Whoop, a biometrical wristband. During the Australian Open, players were asked (or, from their perspective: forced) to take their devices off, even if their are not visible. However, they used it legally in other tournaments. The more I read about the Whoopgate, how this is already named in social media, the more I reflected about it – and felt that I need to set up something to draw my own opinion. I would love to discuss with you.

 

What is Whoop?

The first time I heard about it, Whoop was named being a smartwatch. This is absolutely misleading. Whoop is just a sensor in a wristband. There is no display in it. It is designed to record your health data, e.g. while you exercise and later download it to suitable device. Your data will be stored by Whoop in their systems. This especially means that the wristband is not designed to react on external devices, e.g. by vibrating if you have an incoming call. However, it does have a vibration feature, which is used to wake you up when you have sufficent sleep or warn you if the wristband itself or the connected device is running low on battery. This also means that there is an active data transfer (apart from what is necessary for the communication between devices). The communication is done by Bluetooth.

Whoop is a private US-American company headquartered in Boston. They have been founded in 2012. The first Whoop Wristband, Whoop 1.0, has been released in 2015. The current version is Whoop 5.0. You can buy it with different feature packages, which leads to different pricing. In general, you can only use all Whoop features, including typical health tracking, but also menstrual cycling, ECG or blood pressure (beta feature) if you use their premier Whoop Life subscription, which is currently about 399 Euro per year.

 

Whoop and Tennis

Of course, these kinds of data are very interesting to competitive sportspersons, not only in tennis. Whoop is the official wristband of the women tennis tour WTA, but also of other sports like the Ferrari Formula One racing team. The International Tennis Federation ITF approved Whoop (versions 3.0 to 5.0) on 19th December 2025. The approval explicitly states Permitted use is contingent on the disablement of haptic feedback. However, it is hard to imagine that a referee hears that the wristband of a player is in fact vibrating.

In general, tennis is very shy on using wearables. With all the live betting available, it is likely one of the sports, which is easiest for match fixing and betting fraud. It is very hard to proof that a double fault in a certain situation, for example, has not been done intentionally. Apart from that, the superstars of tennis are multi-millionaires, but the price money distribution is quite in favor of them. The winners in singles of the Australian Open tournament this month, men and women, cash in some 2.4m Euro each. As an example, Luxembourg’s Chris Rodesch, who won an ATP Challenger 100 in Portugal on last week’s Saturday. Despite this was world class tennis, too, he solely received 23,750 EUR for that. By losing in the Australian Open qualifications in the second round two weeks ago, he made significantly more money, roughly 32k EUR. You have to pay your coaches, travel, and these kind of expenses from it – being a tennis professional is a hard job if you are in the 200’s of the respective ranking. And if you don’t even make it into the Grand Slam qualifications, your situation is significantly worse.

 

The Struggle of Federations

Another factor which lead to the confusion in Australia is the potpourri of federations involved in tennis. The ITF I mentioned already is solely responsible for the Davis Cup, the Billy Jean King Cup, as well as minor future and junior tournaments. Then, there is the ATP Tour for men and WTA for women’s tennis. They organize the majority of tournaments, starting from the big ones like Monte Carlo to minor challengers, which are played all across the globe every week.

However, the four Grand Slam tournaments, which include the Australian Open, are rather independent from these three bodies. Playing at these tournaments does, of course, impact your ATP or WTA ranking, but they are not fully bound to their rules. There is a page about the special rules of the Australian Open, which does not include the fact that wearables of any kind are prohibited during the tournament. By the way, this page also states that electronic line calling is immediate and final – which is still questionable in my point of view.

 

Commercial Reason?

There might be an aspect about all that which is not that much discussed in public at the moment. I stumbled upon it by an Instagram reel of former German Davis Cup player Daniel Masur, nowadays ATP #482 in Singles / #213 in Doubles. He assumes that there are commercial reasons behind it and that some of the tennis federations might want to force players to use other wearables, which are sponsoring the tour. He states that the tours have cooperations with other providers, which are significantly worse for the players in the reel.

I cannot comment on that. I feel that if there are official devices, a professional tour has the right to ask players to use them. On the other hand, it is absolutely silly if that was the case. The tennis bodies also don’t force you to use the same racket, sports brand or similar. They should not influence the choice of equipment of a player in that area – maybe unless there is a special device which is having less of the potential issues raised, e.g. if the data is safe and protected during the match (see below).

 

Whoop and Data

One key discussion point is about the data produced. One of the rationales why wearables are banned is not only that potential betting fraud could communicate to players, e.g. by vibration or by messages (if there is a display in the wearable). If you know the health data of a player during the match, you could have additional information for betting. You could also coach the player differently. Communication is done by Bluetooth – so it is likely hard to prevent that you do not only review your health data after the match, but have somebody in the stand who is doing it during the match. This person could potentially influence your play accordingly.

There are also secondary issues like the ownership and usage of this data. Anonymized data can be used for research for example, according to Whoop’s data policy. This may be critical. The data coming from a five set tennis match is likely very characteristic, I could imagine that you can easily reconcile it to a certain player and match. Imagine you know that certain player have a significantly stronger energy drop in long tennis matches than others. Or if the health data suggests that he might have cramps soon (which is one of the official arguments). On the other hand, of course, the data is very valuable for the players and coaches. In the example I just made up, you likely would change your training and maybe even your match strategy accordingly.

 

The Whoopgate

At the coin toss, some players were asked to remove their wristband before the match. Sinner and Alcaraz wore it under their sweatband, so that the Whoop device is not really visible for the audience or in TV. This lead to a huge discussion – even in local radio in Dubai, where I am writing this post, it has been extensively discussed.

To make a long story short, this has turned out to become one of the best marketing campaigns for the company. Whoop even announced that the tracker device is independent from the wristband. They also offer special underwear like bras, in which you can put that device and it works accordingly. Thus, they announced to equip “their” players already during the Australian Open with that. It is hard to imagine that there will be body controls before a match at a tennis tournament. So, in fact, likely nothing has changed, apart from that everybody talks about that device from Boston.

 

My Thoughts about Wearables in Sports

I feel it is a very difficult topic. On the one hand, I do understand that the data collected is extremely valuable information for players and coaches. On the other hand, I do see risks. Additionally, I feel that the governing bodies in tennis failed in that topic completely. You should have a general rulebook and strategy for wearables, not everybody making up your own ones. On the other hand, if you compete as a professional player at the Australian Open, you accepted their rules. Having a wearable underneath your wristband or somewhere hidden in your clothing is still breaking the rules. Maybe it makes it even worse. The more it is hidden, the easier it is to use it fraudulently (obviously, I feel that very top players like Sabalenka or Sinner are not really the target for sports fraud – but there are the same rules for everybody).

Wearables are part of modern day life, and I do understand the players’ motivation to use it. Having the data stored by an external provider (rather than locally) is much more convenient as well. Nonetheless, I feel that ITF (and WTA) have been too quick here. An argument which has not been discussed too much in the media, for example, is: if you allow biometric wristbands like Whoop, could one manipulate them in a way that you can communicate with players? Or could you hide something in the wristband which allows you to communicate, e.g. by vibration, minor electric shocks. Of course, you can also send signals by coughing, cheering between points etc. But these things are potentially recorded and archived and could be used against you one day.

 

Tennis has a bigger Problem – Money

I would say that the key issue of tennis is the distribution of money. I stated the Oeiras Open 1 in Portugal last week. The price money for the winner is quite nice. But if you “just” made it to the quarterfinals (which in that case meant, you are still one of the top 327 male tennis players of the world), your paycheck is 4,855 EUR. If you subtract taxes, travel expenses (maybe from Australia…), coaches, you don’t fill up your bank account that much. If you look at the money chart for the ATP 50 tournament held in Vietnam in parallel, you will even get the argument. A single intentional mistake might increase your payroll significantly. Of course, these are still major tennis events – and you can easily bet on them.

The easiest way would be banning sports betting at a certain level. This is, however, unrealistic.

 

Sports in general has failed discussing that topic

I feel that there needs to be a much wider discussion about biometric data in competitive sports. Other sports publish health data. There are, for example, heartbeat displays in Formula One coverage. However, some drivers are not happy with that. Using official trackers and making them public could be one option – but it demands a huge acknowledgement by the players. I am sure many would oppose to that – and it might also raise more questions, e.g. if a player is competing even though he is obviously ill or if there are major increases in their potential within a short time.

As it is hard to judge if public health data is realistic, I would rather ban these devices completely. There is a risk of having non-clean sports by them, especially by manipulating them or hiding additional functions / devices, feels to high to me. I would even go that far that if you hide a device, you should be defaulted. There seemed to have been a collaboration between ITF and Whoop, but I am not sure if they really thought about all aspects. If they did, there should not be any discussions. That’s a very personal view. I am sure that many of you somehow agree to my arguments, but finally come to the conclusion that you should simply accept that risk. If people want to fix matches in sports, they will do anyway. Happy to discuss with you about it.

 

Sources

Here are the sources I used. Excuse me that some of them are in German. I also linked a few sources already in the text above.

 

The title picture of this post has been AI-generated using ChatGPT

 

Postings about Tennis

Here are all postings which are related to tennis on Flyctory.com

 

Boston on Flyctory.com

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