Images: Pro tennis player slams Beijing pollution, fans wear masks

It’s not just the women golfers who have been affected by Beijing’s lovely air this week. The China Open tennis reaches its conclusion today, and while the top players are too media savvy to say anything negative about the pollution in the Chinese capital, Sweden’s Robert Lindstedt has been more forthcoming:

So now I am in Beijing again. The city that cuts of days from your life every time you visit and breathe what they call air here. It’s a joke how smoggy it is here! I wonder what illnesses people will have here in about 20 years.

And a few days later:

Other than that I have been thinking a lot about of how f****** bad the air is over here. it’s a joke. How much of your life disappears when you spend time here? I get dizzy when I get up. Yesterday I couldn’t recover between points in practice and was breathing heavily the whole hour. If you blow your nose in the evening, the paper turns black. It’s just not healthy to be here. I should probably think about that next year…

Not that this should be a surprise: Justine Henin cancelled her trip here in 2007 due to the bad air, and it was a big topic again three years later.

This year, the Bureau of Meteorology has advised people to wear masks while outside, and the fans have been doing just that. Check out the pictures below:

This pair has gone for the more industrial kind:

Sadly the players don’t get this “luxury”…