Doha - Silhouettes instead of photographs, and computer manipulation to conceal thighs: that is how Qatar promoted this week's season-ending WTA Championship. For years the WTA has appealed to sensuality to sell its stars, but the first experience of a Masters tournament in the Middle East left it with no alternative but to moderate its presentations.
The tournament that brings together the season's eight best female tennis players arrived in Qatar shortly after the end of the Ramadan, the month of religious observance in which Muslims fast and generally abstain from worldly activities to meditate and get closer to God.
Qatar, which has experienced an opening to Western culture over the past few years, understood that change cannot happen overnight. So on the streets there is no sign of the WTA's classic advertising posters, showing off the beauty of Serbia's Ana Ivanovic and company.
"Since it was the month of Ramadan, we met and we decided that it was better to have silhouettes and not to show players' legs and arms. We thought we had to adapt to the country and respect its habits and religion," Moroccan Karim Alami, the tournament director, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Tournament organizers had previously sent photographs of the girls wearing tennis clothes to the only advertising agency in Qatar, which is state-owned, and they were rejected.
That is why the tournament seeks to promote itself through posters that only reveal the players' purple silhouettes, with nothing that could be found to have sexual connotations.
"This is their idea," WTA boss Larry Scott told
