Harry Styles Invited Ukrainian Tennis Player to His Show After Her Wimbledon Victory Interfered With Vienna Gig
First the good news: Elina Svitolina advanced to her second consecutive Grand Lam quarterfinal over the weekend. The bad news: it meant that she had to bag on her plan to see Harry Styles‘ Love on Tour date in Vienna over the weekend.
The 28-year-old Ukrainian player who managed to defeat five-time champion Venus Williams, 28th seed Elise Mertens, 2020 Australian Open champ Sofia Kenin and former world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka to make it to the second Wimbledon quarterfinal of her career celebrated the sweet and sour weekend victory with a tweet revealing her winning conundrum.
“Hey guys!! I was supposed to go to see my fav @harrystyles concert in Vienna tomorrow,” she wrote of Styles’ show on Saturday at Vienna’s Ernst Happel Stadion. “But Wimbledon changed my plans [three crying emoji0. Someone want to go? I have two tickets.”
You might be able to guess what happened next.
“Congratulations! We have four shows to go, you’re welcome at any of them,” Styles responded to Svitolina. “Good luck with the rest of the tournament.” While Svitolina is surely focused on her next match, she is likely keeping an eye on the calendar as well, since Styles only has a handful of dates left on the latest European leg of his nearly two-year-old Love on tour outing, which is wrapping up soon.
Styles has four dates remaining, including a Wednesday (July 12) gig in Barcelona, followed by a July 14 gig in Madrid, a July 18 one in Lisbon and the finale at RCF Arena in Reggio Emilia, Italy on July 22. While Svitolina had a pretty epic weekend, Styles’ featured yet another recent example of the disturbing trend of audiences behaving badly after he was stuck in the face by an unknown object during the Vienna show Svitolina missed out on.
In fan video of the incident, Styles, 29, appears to wince in pain and bend over while covering his eye and walking off stage after the object hits him near his eye. And it wasn’t even the second, or third time that’s happened. Last year he had to take a brief break in Chicago after getting struck in the groin by something thrown by a fan. He’s also had Skittles and chicken nuggets launched at him while performing. In addition, recent shows by Bebe Rexha, Lil Nas X and Kelsea Ballerini have had their shows interrupted by the launching of a variety of objects, including a phone, sex toy and bracelet, respectively.
See Svitolina’s tweet and Styles’ response below.
Gil Kaufman
Billboard
