Tennis players were crying foul on Friday after arriving at Victoria’s Oaklands Park to discover the courts had been smeared with feces.
Peter DeGroot thought it was odd that no one was at the Kings Road courts when he arrived at the park at noon. “Usually there are pickleball players before we start playing tennis at 12:30 p.m.,” he said.
He quickly discovered why, however — feces were spread across all four courts. “It was pretty disgusting,” he said. “They even wiped it on the nets.”
One of his fellow players flagged down nearby police officers who were at Oaklands Park for an unrelated matter. The players were told to report the issue to the city’s parks department, DeGroot said.
It’s the first time that DeGroot, who has played tennis at Oaklands Park for 15 years, has seen the courts vandalized that way, he said.
A handful of workers in hazmat suits were seen hosing down the courts around 3 p.m. But the smell had long settled, baked into the area by the heat of the sun.
One worker told a Times Colonist photographer that they had to clean off some handprints made from fecal matter.
DeGroot said that he and his fellow players were able to relocate to Carnavon Park in Oak Bay for their games, but he remains unsettled by the incident. “This is as low as people can go.”
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