Helen Wills

Pull-outs from the Olympic tennis competition has become almost as much of a tradition as the Olympics Games itself.
Maria Sharapova is the most recent example with the reigning Australian Open champion pulling out of the Beijing Games – and the U.S. Open – with a shoulder injury. Other recent pullouts include Marcos Baghdatis, Mario Ancic and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Some other examples of high profile pullouts from past Games include Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf before the 1996 Games in Atlanta, (strained Achilles tendon and left knee injury, respectively) Andre Agassi before the 2000 Games in Sydney (cancer diagnosis to his mother and sister), Serena Williams and Jennifer Capriati before the Athens Games (left knee and hamstring, respectively).
The other high-profile player not in the Beijing field is of course 2003 U.S. Open champion Andy Roddick and 2004 Olympic silver medalist Mardy Fish. While a super-patriot when representing the United States in Davis Cup – and at the 2004 Games – Roddick made the tough decision to focus on getting a leg up on his rivals at the U.S. Open by not traveling to the other side of the globe just two weeks before the fourth and final major tournament of the year. Roddick’s reasoning for skipping the Games is to put the Open as a high priority this time around. Fish, another Davis Cup stalwart, made the tough decision as well having already achieved Olympic glory on his resume.
Another great American tennis champion, Bill Tilden, took perhaps the same reasoning when skipping the Olympic tennis competition at the 1924 Games in Paris, although his public excuse for missing out on the Games was due to his journalistic contracts. On March 11, 1924 – as documented in the my new book On This Day In Tennis History (New Chapter Press, $19.95) – Tilden announced that he will not represent the United States in the Paris Games. Tilden’s reasoning is that even if he wanted to play for the United States, the U.S. Olympic rule that forbids athletes from writing for newspapers prevents him from competing since he is contracted to write two articles per week for various outlets. Wrote the New York Times on the day “The tennis champion had never definitely announced that he would go abroad this year if picked for the Olympic team. Two months ago, Tilden said he did not think he would go because of the sharp competition expected in the national singles and in the Davis Cup matches. He said he regarded the Davis Cup competition more important than the Olympics and that he felt he could husband his strength for those matches in the event he is to be one of the contestants.” The USLTA also had enacted a similar rule for amateur tennis, but it is not scheduled to take affect until Jan. 1, 1925.
Also in 1924, French superstar Suzanne Lenglen withdrew from the competition in the capital city of her home country due to illness. She does, however, attend select sessions of the competition. Reported the Associated Press on the first day of the 1924 competition, “Suzanne Lenglen, the world’s champion, watched some of the matches until the sun became too uncomfortably warm for her. She looked thinner than usual. Mlle. Lenglen said she still felt ill and her appearance bore out her statement.”
The benefactors of Tilden and Lenglen’s withdrawals in 1924? Vincent Richards, Tilden’s Davis Cup teammate who won singles gold over France’s Henri Cochet, and Helen Wills, who won the singles competition over France’s Didi Vlasto.