French women's tennis player Alize Cornet has accepted the apology offered by US Open organisers, but the row surrounding her code violation for removing her shirt on court won't go away.
"I believe that should never happen," fumed former world No.1 Victoria Azarenka following her second-round match on Wednesday.
"If I would say my true feelings, it would be bleeped out, because I think it was ridiculous.
"It was nothing wrong. Nothing wrong. It wasn't anything disrespectful. I'm glad they apologised, and I hope this never happens again.
"There is always a double standard for men and women. But we need to push those barriers."
The US Tennis Association has acknowledged chair umpire Christian Rask had incorrectly warned Cornet for changing her shirt on court at the US Open.
""We regret that a code violation was assessed to Ms Cornet yesterday," read the USTA statement . "We have clarified the policy to ensure this will not happen moving forward.
"Fortunately, she was only assessed a warning with no further penalty or fine."
The decision to penalise Cornet triggered a social media storm with many people labelling the umpire's decision as sexist.
Male players frequently change or remove their shirts between games and sometimes sit shirtless for extended periods of time in their chairs during changeovers.
Cornet said she was surprised to wake up on Wednesday to a full-blown controversy and attempted to downplay the incident.
"For sure, the women are treated a little bit differently," admitted Cornet, who ended up losing her first-round match to Sweden's Johanna Larsson. "I think it gets much better, especially in the tennis.
"I want to be clear about it and I didn't take it that bad. I was just maybe disturbed for 10 seconds and that was it."
The Frenchwoman had been alerted by her boyfriend that she had put her shirt on backwards off court during a heat break.
When she realised her mistake, Cornet walked towards the back of the court pulling off her top, briefly exposing her sports bra, before slipping it back on the right way round and drawing a code violation from Rask.
While Cornet accepted the incident with good humour and grace and was willing to extend the USTA an olive branch, she was far less forgiving to her own tennis federation which recently introduced a dress code for the French Open that will ban Serena Williams's black catsuit.
"Everybody is working in the same direction," Cornet said. "Then we still have some people, like the president of my federation that lives in another time.
"What Bernard Giudicelli said about Serena's catsuit was 10,000 times worse than what happened to me on the court yesterday, because he's the president of French Federation and because he doesn't have to do that.
"This kind of person doesn't have the work that we are all doing to make it more fair for women."
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