Played on pause

The holidays of the leading masters allowed us to remember Kournikova

For most of the world's leading tennis players, a period of relative calm has begun. After two consecutive Grand Slam tournaments - Roland Garros and the British Open - there are traditionally no major competitions on the international calendar in the height of summer. Among the fair sex, the elite will continue to sort things out at a high level only at the very end of July. This will happen on the courts of San Diego, where the first category WTA tournament will take place. In mid-August, men will attend two North American Masters in a row - in Toronto and Cincinnati. So the grandees can afford a break of two weeks to a month.

Wimbledon champion Roger Federer spoke with a smile about his upcoming rest at a press conference after the final match with Rafael Nadal. “My victory is a great joy, but the upcoming holidays are also a small happiness. In order to maintain physical fitness and health until the end of the season, you must take a break in the middle. And I planned it regardless of my result at Wimbledon,” said the world ranking leader.

The strongest tennis players also announced their plans for the near future. Before the start of the tournament in San Diego, nine girls from the top 15 of the individual classification will not compete on the WTA tour, including our Maria Sharapova, Nadezhda Petrova, Elena Dementieva, Svetlana Kuznetsova and Dinara Safina. Only Anastasia Myskina will play in the third category competition in Cincinnati in mid-July. But the Muscovite has already taken a vacation this season - in April she missed two representative tournaments on green clay in the USA, preferring to watch the battles of the Russian hockey championship at home. Before taking a break, Dementieva will have to play for the Russian national team next weekend in the transition match of the World Group of the Fed Cup with the Croatians on the opponents' site. The rest of our leaders, for various reasons, do not yet play for the national team, Sharapova has never been in the national team, and it is unknown whether she will be in it at all.

July is a perfect month for holding two of the strongest club championships - the German Bundesliga and the American World Team Tennis tournament. These tournaments are half show, half sport. In the off-season, which prevails in almost all team sports, such competitions are designed to entertain the sweltering German burghers and overseas fans. The tennis players themselves don’t really strain themselves here, but participation in these championships is a good way to stay in shape and earn extra money.

Club leagues have a very varied composition of participants - elite players, beginning juniors, unknown inhabitants of the second, third and further hundreds of the world rankings, diluted with famous veterans or those who completed an active career at a young age. The well-known Belgians Oliver and Christophe Rochus, the Czech Jiri Novak, the Romanian Andrei Pavel, and the Spaniards Alberto Martin and Alberto Costa have already played in the first round of the men's Bundesliga. Against this background, World Team Tennis looks like a more pompous tournament. Contracts to play in several matches for various clubs were signed by Martina Hingis (New York), Venus Williams (Philadelphia), Nastya Myskina (Springfield), Martina Navratilova (Boston) and those who retired long ago, but Anna Kournikova (Sacramento), Pete Sampras (Newport) and even John McEnroe (New York) have not parted with their racket.

Kournikova's teammates were Nicole Vaidishova, Elena Likhovtseva and 2006 junior Roland Garros finalist Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova. While the last three have yet to enter the game, Anna was fully involved in the first three rounds of the championship. Kournikova takes part mainly in doubles and mixed doubles matches without much success. Anna and her partners in duets have continuous defeats, however, with a minimal difference in the score - 4:5 (in the American championship the match consists of one game up to five points). In singles, the ex-tennis diva played only one game. Having lost it to Angela Haynes, Anna was replaced by Bettany Mattek - this is also allowed by the World Team Tennis regulations.

This week, insignificant ATP tournaments are taking place in Europe, where individual players are trying to rehabilitate themselves for a not very successful performance at Wimbledon, finding themselves in a more familiar element - on clay. Nikolai Davydenko was “seeded” number one in Bastad (Sweden) and has already passed the first round, defeating the ubiquitous Alberto Martin, who played in the Bundesliga the day before - 6:4, 6:1. Two more Russians made it into the main draw through qualification - Yuri Korolev and Yuri Shchukin. On the courts of Gstaad (Switzerland), Croatian Ivan Ljubicic and Argentinean Gaston Gaudio are considered the main favorites.

Ilya TRISVIATSKY