The WTA Finals will be taking place at Indian Wells in November according to Tumaini Carayol of The Guardian on Wednesday. The tournament was initially scheduled for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The move comes at a time when the ATP Tour is planning to have a Masters 1000 series event in Saudi Arabia in the not too distant future.
The Indian Wells Tennis Garden is the host site of a joint ATP and WTA Masters 1000 series event in March on an annual basis. It is the first ATP Masters 1000 series event of the year and third WTA Masters 1000 series event of the year. Indian Wells follows WTA events in Qatar and Dubai, which take place in February after the Australian Open.
The WTA Finals feature the top eight women’s players in the world on the singles side, and the top eight women’s doubles teams in the world on the doubles side. The WTA Finals have been in the United States before. The host sites have been Boca Raton, Florida for the first two years of the competition (1972 and 1973), Los Angeles, California for the next three years (1974 to 1976), New York City (1977 and again from 1979 to 2000), Oakland, California (1978), Los Angeles for four straight years (2002 to 2005), and Fort Worth, Texas (2022).
When the WTA Finals were last held in the United States four years ago, the champion was France’s Caroline Garcia. Riyadh was the host of the last two WTA Finals. The champions were Coco Gauff of the United States and Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan.
