Bianca Andreescu gives Nike a dressing down at US Open before issuing apology for remarks she said compared Donald Trump to Nazi Germany
Former world number one tennis player Bianca Andreescu has apologised to Nike after she used the company’s athletes to criticise Donald Trump’s “America First” policy before giving an endorsement to the president in an article in the Miami Herald.
After the fallout from the controversial article, Andreescu, 38, has issued a statement on her official website in which she said she had meant no offence and would not resign from the endorsement as she had stated in comments to the Miami Herald.
“I want to apologise to all the people who work at Nike for the way I was treated last week. I was surprised by how the events unfolded,” she wrote.
Nike, which had no comment on Wednesday morning, told the Miami Herald it had done the same in a statement.
The tennis star is a self-proclaimed pro-Trump, conservative and pro-second amendment, and has said she believes that the president is going too far in his attempts to tackle immigrants on the southern border, telling TMZ in August: “I think it’s a very stupid statement.”
However, Andreescu has also been a vocal critic of the president for his first two years in office and often targets him for his Twitter comments and actions, saying in an interview with CBS earlier this year: “He does not respect other people or their civil rights.”
In the Herald article, Andreescu, a professional tennis player who won the singles and doubles titles as the number one ranked player in the world during her career, described how she had taken time off from training to visit with the president while he was in Miami last October.
Andersson, 30, was in attendance when the president and his son Donald Trump Jr visited the US Open and posed for pictures before the matches on clay courts.
Asked by the Herald about the visit in her article about “a trip from first daughter Ivanka to meet with a president who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and referred to Jews like a ‘term of endearment’,” Andreescu wrote: “I was not planning on attending. I didn’t see as a positive point to attending.
“What
