When the Olympic tennis competition begins on Sunday, August 9 at Beijing Olympic Green Tennis Centre, there will be one element missing to what is a magical and unique experience in the sport. While players face much different pressures than they have ever felt in the sport (i.e., lose this match and your medal chances are gone forever, or at least for another four years, if you are even still playing top-level pro tennis by then), players never face the pressure – and excitement – of a TEAM competition.
I was fortunate to be the press officer for the last three U.S. Olympic tennis teams for the USTA (1996, 2000, and 2004) and I particularly remember my stint in 2000 in Sydney when the U.S. women’s team of Venus Williams, Serena Williams, Lindsay Davenport and Monica Seles, captained by Billie Jean King, was dubbed the tennis version of the “Dream Team.” However, outside of Venus pairing with Serena in winning the doubles gold that year, the “team” concept was nothing more than a “dream.” All four standout future Hall of Famers were playing as individuals. They all wore the same USA sweat jackets, traded the same USA Tennis Olympic pins and appeared together a pre-event “team” press conference, but they were not a “team” competing for the same goal – sharing the thrill of victory and suffering the agony of defeat. Anyone who has played team tennis – whether it be Davis Cup, Fed Cup, World Team Tennis, college tennis, high school tennis or USTA League Tennis, knows that you are not just playing for yourself, but for your teammates and your country, college, school or friends. There’s that additional pressure, the intangible element that causes for a different level of excitement and makes a player dig deeper or feel the heat even more.
Observers have suggested that a separate team competition be added to the Olympic program in addition to the men’s and women’s singles and doubles competition. However, there are two issues that will make this difficult, it not impossible. For starters, the tennis calendar is messed up already as it is (even without the Olympics being thrust into the schedule every four years), so wedging in another, separate team competition and extending the Olympic tennis competition beyond an eight or nine-day event would not be feasible. Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, had a motto for the Games which is “not winning but taking part.” With this in mind, it is a high priority for the International Olympic Committee and the International Tennis Federation that as much of the tennis globe as possible is represented in the Games, including players in 2008 field, including Komlavi Loglo from Togo and Rafael Arevalo from El Salvador in the men’s field. It’s an important element to increasing the popularity of the game worldwide to have players from as many nooks and crannies be represented – as appropriate – to provide for role models and goal-setting in developing tennis nations. Tennis needs to have its “Jamaican bobsled team” so to speak.
My idea to bring a team element into the Olympic competition – without jeopardizing the tennis schedule and the opportunities for as many nations as possible to compete – is to implement a “points” system to determine the winner of the gold, silver and bronze winners of a team competition. For every singles or doubles match that a player or team wins at the Games, his or her nation would be awarded one point. The nation with the most points at the end of the Olympic singles and doubles competition will be declared the winner of the gold medal in the team competition. The second place team wins the silver and the third place wins the bronze.
This is not a novel concept. Until the NCAA team tournament was implemented in 1979 in American college tennis, this format was used to determine the NCAA team champions. Certain college conference championships, for example the Southeastern Conference (SEC), also used the formula to a degree in determining the team champion up until the early 1990s. High school state competitions also have used the formula. My high school team, New Canaan High School, was declared the Connecticut State High School “Class LL” State Champions with a similar format in 1987.
Here’s how the competition would have turned out in the last three Olympic tennis competitions;
2004 Olympics – Athens, Greece
Men Women
Gold – Chile (15 points) Gold – France (10 points)
Silver – U.S. (14 points) Silver – Russia (9 points)
Bronze – Spain (8 points) Australia (9 points)
– Croatia (8 points)
2000 Olympics – Sydney, Australia
Men Women
Gold – Spain (10 points) Gold – U.S. (16 points)
Silver – France (9 points) Silver – Belgium (10 points)
Bronze – Canada (8 points) Bronze – Russia (7 points)
1996 Olympics – Atlanta, Ga. USA
Men Women
Gold – U.S. (10 points) Gold – U.S. (17 points)
Australia (10 points) Silver – Spain (13 points)
Bronze – Spain (8 points) Bronze – Czech Republic (9 points)
An issue that comes up is a case of “ties” in point totals – which would not be unprecedented in Olympic competition. Perhaps there are appropriate “tie-breakers” that can be used, such as how the nations have fared in head-to-head competitions against each other in the singles and doubles draws or the least number of sets lost (tie-breakers used to break ties in the round-robin competitions in the ATP and WTA Tour year-end championships).
This “points” concept would a singular concept in the sport. No other tennis event (team or individual) would feature this format which would further enhance the “unique-ness” of the Olympic tennis competition. Let’s keep track of how this format works in Beijing and see what nations would win a theoretical “Team Gold.” Perhaps the ITF and IOC will take notice and when the tennis competition for the London Games in 2012 is held at Wimbledon, tennis can feature an added element of excitement that could further increase the sport’s visibility on the Olympic landscape.
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