Women’s Olympic tennis - Under aged, under sexed, over paid and over there
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Canada’s Aleksandra Wozniak and Marie Eve Pellettie at Rogers Cup, Montreal on Tuesday demonstrating all the power, emotion and appeal of the modern women’s game.
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In Mike Marqusee’s boxing epic Redemption Song about racism and the rise of Cassius Clay, aka Mohammed Ali, in the ‘60s, he argues that boxing became the symbolic focus of the civil rights movement. Black boxers were inherently products of racists systems elected to represent either black or white interests. Inadvertently they were adopted and became political icons of both good and bad and often both.
Fifty years on and we are about to witness another politicising of ideas in the furnace of top class sport. This time it is in women’s tennis. The lessons and meaning may be slightly harder to define and extrapolate, but they are to do with those age old topics of morality, money, sex, betting and ultimately probably naked greed. We just don’t have as yet Marqusee’s advantage - hindsight.
Superficially the emergence of the eastern Europeans to dominate the women’s game could have been read - and would have been 30 years ago - as the power of nationalist ambition, but as the Bjorn Borg example has proven no amount of patriotic fervour really guarantees or proffers talent on any single nation. Jie Zheng may have delighted at Wimbledon and the Taiwanese pair Chan Yung-Jan and Chuang Chia-Jung won the doubles in Los Angeles last week, but realistically the Asians are unlikely to make the kind of breakthrough they may have hoped for at the Beijing Olympics in August. Zheng is a sobering 59/1 against winning the gold medal.
Many fly flags of convenience in what is a global market. Britain’s top players are Burmese and Urkainian via Hackney and Mitcham respectively. The emerging talent Caroline Wozniaki is Polish but plays as a Dane. The world’s most famous Russian has lived in Florida since she was seven. Patriotism is not the issue in this most individual of sports which will be a further contradiction of the Olympic ideal.
The issues are more complicated, even one might say personal, than nationality. The emergence of women’s tennis as a respectable global medium in the last decade has been breathtakingly fast. It’s old feisty warhorse-lesbians-in-the-locker-room clothes have been well and truly recycled in the charity shop. Even the old adage that women could not kick it like the men was disproved at the Wimbledon finals when the victorious Venus Willliams served as hard and as fast as the men’s champion Rafael Nadal – 129 mph.
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These highly empowered, many teenage, millionairesses will compete at the Olympics for no money just pride and glory. Amateurs for a day, or perhaps a week. Or put more cynically for the fame that another worldwide TV audience will bless on the most inspiring of these new style girl gladiators. The prize money they usually fight for is only one part of an income now swelled by the hugely respectable, and very masculine, sponsorship suitors like Mercedes, Sony Eriksson and IBM and increasingly new opportunities in the fashion arena. What Maria Sharapova wears in Beijing will be as eagerly anticipated as her first service game. What she smells like too, because she also has her own perfume brand. |
| Maria Sharapova in her new outfit |
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Both the Williams sisters Venus and Serena have fashion ties ins for own label clothes lines which even go some way beyond just sport. How far the sports world has rolled on from the days that the new world heavyweight champion Cassius Clay sat down and told shocked reporters his sponsor was Islam. |
| Serena and Venus William |
Nationhood has been replaced by brandhood for these girls. Olympic champion will be just another cute slogan..
None of the big names will be financially bothered by the altruism of the Olympics. Their oath has already been taken to the Olympus US Open later in the month at Flushing Meadows where the prize money will top $20 million plus the winner gets to drive off in a brand new Lexus. The US Tennis Open did not start until three years after Clay battered Sonny Liston to defeat in Miami. Against that the oath that they will compete “for the glory of sport” will sound a little hollow to competitors in other disciplines that have not been so systematically commercialised to this extent.
The arguments about whether young children should have their lives usurped by a mission to play tennis at the highest level or even are entitled to earn such vast wealth have already been dragged through the mill with rock and roll stars and others over the years, although as the Williams sisters demonstrated so capably in SW19 in June, mental toughness is going to be as much an asset as volley play. It was perhaps an unnoticed virtue, but one that they shared with Clay, who was also the supreme athlete, how their daily real life must revolve around the humdrum repetition of hard, tough gym work, fitness training and racket skills before their brief hour or so in the spotlight.
Last week Liverpool University gave the Liverpool soccer captain Steven Gerrard an honorary degree for achievement in sport, so perhaps, at least for the winners, studying is now truly officially academic. Given the state of sport in our UK schools, given even the state of some these schools is it really wrong for talented children to turn their back on conventional learning and dedicate themselves to their chosen discipline with the possibility of vast rewards and at least an entrée into a global community? To at least have a chance of a job?
Part of tennis’s new image is that many of these talented girls just happen to have the looks of fashion models which is already raising uncomfortable questions. Sharapova has seen a court case against a businessman who said he specialised in taking pictures up girl’s skirts. There are 640,000 pictures of her published on the net. Of the 248,000 rampant soft porn images of her iconic predecessor Ana Kournikova splattered across the net, more are in swimwear than with racket in hand.
Both have channelled some of their fortunes into charities to help deserving causes, but it is usually part of the territory that at this age, most tennis stars are silent movies in terms of what they might have to say for themselves. Clay, at their age, was a radical politicised black man. These girls may well develop their own politics but for the most part they are cocooned in a world of airplanes, practise courts, strange rented homes none of which are likely to engage them in joined up thinking about the world or issues. They write web blogs about pop stars and pizza. They are teenagers. Or one might say, because it is too easy to forget, they are teenagers as well.
But they are also beloved trophies in our own televised universe – virtual daughters, cousins, best friends of, but not real. They are their own soap stars. Their perceived public personas are probably well wide of the mark and rarely glimpsed. Instead they become concocted global avatars and probably have as much control on their own destiny as you or I. It might be argued that as global supernovas they have the more admirable entitlement to riches compared to models because they do not just tend to their good looks, but are young people who have usually given up a great deal in terms of family life to have a chance to play at the highest level, are necessarily supremely dedicated, and forced to travel incessantly wherever around the globe that contest is taking place. They have honed their natural skill to their often necessarily extraordinary will.
A telling curiosity though is the way the Williams sisters, as sisters both competing in the same universe, are also able apparently to draw strength from each other. Ana Ivanovic has said the same of her Serb compatriots Novak Jokovic, and Jelena Jankovic. Being Serbian together has been a help. To an extent the same might be said of the Russian girls like Elena Dementieva.
Then we come to that other bête noire of the moment – gambling. Betting and sport have gone hand in hand since Rome and probably before that. Marqusee points out that rich white businessmen would sponsor white fighters to take on blacks to prove their racial supremacy. Poor men wagered on the event. Rich men wagered with each other. There are as many different opinions on the merits of gambling as there are countries. Even today in France and Germany betting is not strictly approved as governments consider how best they can replenish the public coffers with a bit of lottery style bravado. If Barack Obama wins the US election, California is expected to throw the controls out of the skyscraper window too. In tennis the potential dangers of match fixing have been highlighted not by the sports governing bodies but by the bookmakers themselves who have more than a vested interest in keeping the sport clean. For their pains, the Australian Grand Slam hosts threw the official Melbourne bookmakers off the site. What has shocked the establishment more than anything is that tennis is now the third most popular sports bet in the world after soccer and horse racing.
Martina Navratilova has gone public and said if she had wanted to fix a tennis match, no one would have spotted it. So has Andy Murray. There has been suspicious cartel like betting patterns from Russia and other countries reported. Plus one company voided $7m of bets on a match between world number 4 Nikolay Davydenko. But as Roger Federer has been quoted as saying he has seen very little problem.
Why should there be? For the top players there is no reason to succumb. There is more money in winning for real. In this electronic age with online betting, it is almost inevitable that any match fixing would be exposed immediately – not in the locker rooms but by the patterns of betting. Players and perpetrators would be publicly named and shamed overnight on the web. There can be no greater public scrutiny or sanction.
In many ways tennis has become different to other sports in that winning is not itself quite as absolutely necessary to the whole process of success. One match does not usually decide a career, not even one tournament. There are many tournaments. The sport is cyclical. The window to attain the spotlight is wide. The audience and timing is global. Tim Henman was a national icon without ever winning Wimbledon. Tennis stars of the new era may not even win very often. They are part of a cast each one feeding the other lines. It is a more friendly approach to competition compared to soccer’s ultimate mantra to win at all costs.
The big money in betting is increasingly moving not just on line but on to live betting where the odds are fractional and successive increments are needed to accumulate significant winnings which in a practical sense protects the integrity of the sport. The technology like Hawkeye protect officials from accusations of bribery.
The concerns voiced by tournament organisers are perhaps a bombastic smoke screen. Behind this huff and bluster is of course money. The tournaments desire to own everything to do with Grand Slam events, right down to any potential revenues that might lurk in the recesses of this brave new global media universe. The girls will behave because they will be told to behave or they will be excommunicated. The promoters want a tax on your bet. They have sold tickets, they have sold television rights, they have sold the placards on the side of the court and they see the next pay cheque coming from the bookmakers. In that way they are no different to the white racists who put up the money for those early prize fights except in a more genteel sense here they can parade around with some beautiful young girls on their arms.
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In the dawning eve of web TV, betting represents a major new source of revenue. These sports promoters protest too much…they need this sport of all sports to be as clean and sparkling white as a Wimbledon tennis frock because no one will bet on it if it isn’t. They are just looking after their little girls’ future dowry and making sure they can afford to pay for it. |
| Winner in Los Angeles, Darina Safinn | |
