One tennis star’s journey from Dubai back home - after a title win amid explosions

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Trying to change his kids’ car seats, in searing 86-degree heat, while attempting a border crossing from the United Arab Emirates into Oman, was not how Harri Heliövaara had expected his Dubai Tennis Championships to go.

He did not expect to wake up to the sound of an emergency alert for incoming missiles at 2 a.m. He did not expect to be told that he could not leave the United Arab Emirates, nor to walk onto court for an ATP Tour final to the sound of explosions in the distance.

Heliövaara, 36, is a two-time Grand Slam doubles champion. He is also one of several tennis players who were stranded in Dubai early last week after Iran retaliated against U.S. and Israeli strikes by launching strikes of its own on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and some neighboring countries.

The Dubai Tennis Championships is an ATP 500 event, a couple of rungs down from the Grand Slams. Heliövaara won the men’s doubles event, with partner Henry Patten of Great Britain, but it was the five days he spent trying to leave it that turned the past week into the most challenging of his career.

“Tennis has brought us into some strange situations and given us so many memories,” he said during a phone interview from his home in Finland Friday, having landed in Helsinki late Wednesday night. “I think we can add this one to the list.”

Last Saturday began unremarkably for Heliövaara, the doubles world No. 8 who has been ranked as high as No. 3. He was playing with his children, daughter Alba, 4, and son, Aston, 2, when he checked his phone and saw reports of the United States and Israeli strikes on Iran. News then started to come through of retaliatory attacks, and before long Heliövaara could hear explosions and fighter jets above. “It suddenly started to feel very real,” he said.

Emergency alerts have continued into this week, and the situation remains tense. The U.S. and Israel have launched further strikes on Iran, with Iran’s U.N. Ambassador, Amir Saeid, telling reporters in New York Friday that at least 1,332 Iranian civilians have died. The UAE ministry of defense has recorded three fatalities, the New York Times reported.

Heliövaara and Patten were due to start their final against Croatia’s Mate Pavić and Marcelo Arévalo of El Salvador at 4:30 p.m. local time.

Heliövaara was expecting the match to be canceled, but they and the singles finalists, Daniil Medvedev and Tallon Griekspoor, were invited into the ATP’s office and told that the matches could still go ahead, because local authorities had not instructed people to shelter in place.

Later in the week, two lower-tier ATP events started in Fujairah, about 120 miles away from Dubai, before being canceled following a security alert that saw players run off the court mid-match.

An ATP spokesperson later said via email that the doubles final “being played was in line with guidance from local authorities at the time.”

Heliövaara said he still expected the match to be canceled, and he and Patten postponed their warm-up in anticipation of it being called off.

He said they were “very close” to requesting it not happen, but admitted that “everybody is a little greedy” and the players were aware that if the match were canceled, none of them would get the winners’ prize money and points.

Once they decided to play, Patten told Heliövaara that they had to win, given they would likely have a lot of time for a final defeat to linger in the back of their minds over the following days.

“We were walking to the court, and at the same time you could hear this huge roar of fighter planes,” Heliövaara said. “It was crazy. And then, during the first set, we heard some explosions. And you think, ‘Are we still playing, really?’”

The noise of explosions was juxtaposed with what Heliövaara called a “surprisingly normal” atmosphere, with a crowd, although sparse, not behaving much differently to at most events. Patten and Heliövaara agreed afterwards that they had enjoyed feeling ensconced in the bubble of competitive sport, knowing that their insulation from the outside world wasn’t going to last much longer.

After winning 7-5, 7-5, the players expected an action plan from the tournament about what would come next. But the situation was so uncertain that they were just told to stay in their hotel and seek shelter.

A few hours later, at 2 a.m. Sunday morning, Heliövaara and his wife were awoken by the sound of an emergency alarm on their phones saying that missiles were headed toward the UAE.

“That was the first real panic feeling that we got,” he said. “I thought, ‘OK, we really need to get out of here.’”

They scooped up their sleeping children and headed downstairs, where many other guests at the five-star Creekside Hotel had gathered. They were told that they would be safe in their rooms and didn’t need to head down to the basement — though Heliövaara knows of people staying in other hotels who were sent underground. Another luxury hotel in Dubai, the Fairmont, was set on fire by a drone collision during the strikes Saturday.

Heliövaara said it was a blessing that his two children were too young to understand what was going on, even if he felt that Alba could sense her parents’ anxiety. He also felt that the kids’ presence was a blessing, as it forced them to try to keep things light. Patten, who was traveling solo, “struggled a little more because he was alone and then it’s very easy to end up in this more negative circle,” Heliövaara said.

Patten declined an interview request Monday.

The tournament covered the cost of the family’s ongoing stay at the hotel, which the next day saw them not even leave their room. “A drone hit the airport that day, right next to the hotel for example, so you don’t feel comfortable going outside,” Heliövaara said.

“We tried to remind ourselves that the actual chance of something dropping from the sky on us was very, very, very low. But it’s the uncertainty that’s the difficulty there. You don’t know.”

There was another meeting with tournament and ATP staff on Sunday night, but he said there was precious little information. That remained the case Monday night.

Heliövaara was booking refundable flights everyday — “my credit card limit has been struggling” — but flights out of Dubai remained grounded. But he saw that a commercial flight was going from Muscat, Oman, a couple of hours drive away, to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Monday and managed to get four tickets. Patten got one as well, and so at 9 a.m. Tuesday, they gathered to leave the hotel.

The car that came to pick them up was too small, and the driver for the replacement car didn’t have his passport, which would be required to try to cross the border. “It was a mess from the beginning,” Heliövaara said.

After leaving an hour later than planned, they got to the border and “things went downhill.”

The car they were in did not have the right documentation to cross the border, but eventually they all moved into another car, one with an Omani registration. Cars registered to the UAE were not being allowed over the border, which led to Heliövaara moving his two children’s car seats as the desert sun beat down, as well as the five people plus six bags eventually cramming into one car. It was so cramped that Heliövaara and Patten, 6-2 and 6-5 respectively, had to share a seat in the back row.

They sat for an hour, before being told that one of them was not authorized to leave the country. Heliövaara is uncertain as to why, but he thinks it may have been to do with not having returned his rental car when it was due back — which had been impossible because the airport had been closed.

“The stress levels were high,” Heliövaara said. “There was just so much going on.”

Heliövaara, his family and Patten were told to get out of the car, before being taken back to the first checkpoint in a police car.

From there, they had to repack their stuff into another car, to take them back to Dubai. After about seven hours of sitting in either moving or stationary cars, the Heliövaaras and Patten got back to their Dubai hotel. And then a fortunate reprieve — at around 11 p.m., Heliövaara was summoned downstairs by the ATP manager to be told that Emirates staff were at the hotel sorting out flights for the guests, a luxury not afforded to many others unable to leave the country.

He and his family managed to get on one to Milan, and got to the airport, which Heliövaara said was “surprisingly normal.” “I couldn’t believe that Louis Vuitton and all the shops were open, the lounges were open. What’s going on? The airport had been bombed two days ago but everything looks normal now.”

After the anxiety of fearing that they wouldn’t be allowed to fly out after what had happened at the Omani border, Heliövaara and his family got on the plane. He generally likes to be one of the last on in order to minimise the time his kids are on board for, but was taking no chances this time — and they promptly took their seats in economy.

Griekspoor and Arévalo were on the same flight, while Medvedev and fellow Russian players Andrey Rublev and Karen Khachanov had flown on a private jet from Oman to Turkey, before heading to Indian Wells, Calif. for the BNP Paribas Open.

Players and staff from the Fujairah tournaments were also slowly finding routes out of Dubai.

Heliövaara has a big interest in aviation, and was skeptical about flying when there had still been fighter jets in the sky and explosions over the previous few days.

There was a palpable feeling of relief when the plane took off, and entered Egyptian airspace after flying over Saudi Arabia. When they landed in Milan, Heliövaara’s wife broke down in tears. “And it was just spontaneous clapping from everybody on the plane,” Heliövaara said. “People were very emotional.”

It was around 9 a.m., and their flight to Helsinki wasn’t until 7 p.m. They booked into an airport hotel for the day and all four of them had the “best sleep” — the days of fretting starting to dissipate. “Over lunch we didn’t have a single worry,” he said.

Heliövaara had been documenting events in his blog, in Finnish, and people were in touch asking what was happening. He started it as almost a travel blog, when traveling around the ITF circuit as a singles player in the early 2010s. After a hiatus, he started it again a few years ago. Written in Finnish, but read by many more in English online last week, it became a reference point for tennis fans seeking updates.

Heliövaara and his family were met by his dad at the airport. After one last challenge with reclaiming their bags (“but who cares?”), they were dropped off at home at about 1 a.m. Thursday. Patten had a longer journey, but returned to London via Cairo and Rome, before heading to North Carolina, where he lives. The players and ATP staff, in total more than 40 people, have all now been able to leave Dubai.

Heliövaara and Patten have decided to skip Indian Wells, not feeling physically or mentally ready to compete. Heliövaara hasn’t trained since last Saturday’s final, and won’t over the weekend. Then he’ll get back at it before flying out for the Miami Open March 18.

“Getting home is always special, but this time, I thought ‘please, let me be here for a while,’” he said. “There’s so much stress and all that stress leaving the body, leaving the mind, I’m feeling extremely tired still. It’s been almost 48 hours since I came home, but I have no energy to do anything much.”

During the interview, Heliövaara was taking his dog for a walk in the Helsinki snow, with the temperature at 23 degrees Fahrenheit. He knows that in the grand scheme of things and compared to what has been unleashed by last weekend’s strikes and responses, he has not experienced any great struggle. It’s still good to be home.

“It’s nice and wintery,” he said.

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