Around the Olympics: Day 2

by Pete Bodo

It was a classic Grand Slam-style moment, available only to television viewers but memorable nonetheless. Out on Centre Court at the All England Club, in a first-round Olympics match, Brazil's Thomaz Bellucci was giving as good as he got in a rally of warp-speed ground strokes with No. 5 seed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Bellucci felt a visible surge of elation as the linesman confirmed that a prodigious backhand by the Frenchman Tsonga had flown just long.

Game and first set to Mr. Bellucci, seven games to six.

Moments later, on Court No. 1, Fabio Fognini of Italy, ahead 8-7 in the first-set tiebreaker suspended due to rain hours earlier (at 7-all!) drew a bead on No. 2 seed Novak Djokovic's service return and did what he had failed at when he had a set point earlier in the match—he stepped in and attacked the ball with conviction, driving a backhand winner down the line to salt away the set just like Bellucci had done.

It briefly looked like we might experience firsthand how different best-of-three set tennis can be from the familiar best-of-five drill we see during Wimbledon, but that wasn't in the soggy cards today. Both favorites roared back to win (see below).

Some of you may have had the same feeling I did when I looked at the draws and schedule yesterday morning. I felt, well, overwhelmed, especially when I took into account the doubles. The singles draw may be 64 for both men and women (creating an already tight schedule for a nine-day event), but this is the Olympics. The medals they give out for doubles have the same value and prestige as any other in the Games, and they count just as much in the record book and medal standings.

I realized a few hours in yesterday that I didn't fully appreciate how quickly best-of-three matches can fly by, even ones that go the distance, but clearly Wimbledon and ITF officials did. But one thing they can't be predicted as accurately is the weather. And the rain today was as threatening as it was irritating.

Sure, the Centre Court has a roof; unfortunately, that only guarantees that the tournament will finish on time if the rainouts occur late in the tournament (as was the case a few weeks ago at Wimbledon). It's a little different during the Grand Slam event in London, where the 13 day schedule and the overwhelming priority on singles allows for a lot of flexibility—and therefore a lot of rain. But at the Olympics, where doubles counts for so much, the tournament will really suffer if we get significant washouts in the next two or three days. The schedule today called for 48 matches; only 12 were completed.

And here's a wild-card factor: Because of the state of the courts after Wimbledon, only 12 courts were to be used for the Olympic event (one prominent exclusion: The very cozy and pleasant Court 3 stadium). Would the referee decide to use some of the off-limits courts, even if they were somewhat chewed up, if the need were dire?

Okay, we'll burn that bridge when we come to it. And now for the distribution of our accolades and otherwise:

Germany's Julia Goerges pulled off the biggest upset of the first two days when she survived a comeback by Agnieszka Radwanska of Poland, seeded No. 2 and a Wimbledon finalist just weeks ago. The scores were 7-5, 6-7 (5), 6-4. It was the second straight day that a recent Wimbledon runner-up was beaten (on opening day, it was Tomas Berdych, the losing finalist in 2010, who went down in flames), which suggests that Maria Sharapova, Vera Zvonareva, and Andy Roddick had better watch their backs.

Radwanska is a significant scalp to take because it isn't often that she beats herself, while Goerges is the opposite—somewhat prone to emotional ups and downs, and a forehand that sometimes has a mind of its own. If you saw the way Radwanska bolted out to a 6-2 lead in the second-set tiebreaker or how, after seizing the momentum by winning the set, she broke Goerges for 1-2 in the third, you might have been convinced that Goerges had merely set off a false alarm. Not so.

Regaining her composure—as well as the range on her serve and forehand—Goerges broke back for 3-all and went on to break Radwanska in the 10th and final game of the third set with a terrific inside-out forehand service return winner. The Serena-esque win by Goerges was built on 20 aces and a grand total of 56 winners—more than twice as many as Radwanska hit.

!ThumbsupTsonga and Djokovic, as noted above, both escaped upsets at the hands of, respectively, Bellucci and Fognini, the latter seemingly arriving fresh off the set of the latest movie in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (Fognini playing Johnny Depp's long lost twin brother).

Okay, kidding. But in any event, Fognini played the first set in swashbuckling style in every sense of the world (he was dressed in Wimbledon-worthy whites that contrasted sharply with his keenly groomed, jet black facial hair). But Djokovic helped Fognini with some uncharacteristically sloppy—or was it "nervous"?—play. He made 17 unforced errors in the first set, but then just six more over the last two sets of his 6-7 (7), 6-2, 6-2 win.

It was an excellent fightback, but it also had to leave his fans feeling a little nervous because he seemed a little lackluster, a little too within himself, just as he had in the Wimbledon semifinal with Roger Federer. Fognini was 1-16 against Top 10 opposition (he recorded his lone win at Wimbledon two years ago, against Fernando Verdasco), so it's pretty clear that Djokovic is likely to meet more dangerous and threatening competition in the coming rounds.

Tsonga's come-from-behind win saw him in greater danger for a longer time. Bellucci, a mercurial, gifted left-hander, has been making strikes in the mental department lately. He went deep in two clay-court tournament just before the Olympics, losing in the semis of Stuttgart to Janko Tipsarevic and exacting vengeance the following week over the same rival in the final of Gstaad. Pundits galore have been waiting to see if Bellucci would ever get his head together, could it happen at the Olympics?

Bellucci and Tsonga were both in fire in the first set; both had a first-serve conversion rate above 70 percent and neither lost a point on his second serve. It was an old-fashioned grass-court shootout, and Bellucci struck the first significant blow when he bounced back from a mini-break that made it 1-2 in the first-set tiebreaker to even it up at 3-all. There were no more mini-breaks until the final point (described at the top of this story).

By then, it was clear that Tsonga was having trouble with his footing; he was slipping, sliding and tumbling left and right. He changed his shoes for the second set, which solved some of his footing problems enough so to make him confident. The match remained competitive and entertaining. Bellucci demonstrated once again that he has the ability to reel off winners, but also that he's more apt to do it when he's just trying to stay in the rear view mirror of his opponent. "He's a lefty, he's tall, and he's really impressive," The No. 5 seed said of Bellucci, after he put up his 6-7 (5), 6-4, 6-4 win. "You think he will kill the ball but he has a very nice touch as well."

Bellucci is improving, but he still has a long way to go to fulfill his potential.

You have to feel for Bernard Tomic of Australia, who lost to Japan's Kei Nishikori in a pair of identical, 7-4 tiebreaker sets. Just 19, Tomic had a breakout year at Wimbledon in 2011 (he qualified and even got a set off Novak Djokovic in the quarterfinals—Tomic's eighth match of the tournament). But he's now lost in the first round in his last six tournaments, and his ranking (No. 49) is likely to plummet.

What's worse, Tomic was frankly and touchingly fired up about the Olympics, recently telling the AAP news agency, "You can't put into words what winning a gold medal would mean. I can only dream of it. (The Olympics) is like a fifth Grand Slam and something I always wanted to do better at than Grand Slams."

Tomic also reckoned that lower-ranked players stood a better chance at the Olympics because of the best-of-three sets format. The handwriting was on the wall for this one at Wimbledon, where Tomic split sets with talented and diligent Belgian wild card—and ATP No. 70—David Goffin, only to take his foot off the gas and petulantly take a four-set loss.

Nobody has ever questioned Tomic's talent; what concerns were expressed have been about his competitive character and work ethic. He's young and still absorbing the harsh facts of tennis life—the first of which is that you must remain eternally vigilant and perpetually diligent.

In the "at least this hasn't gone viral on YouTube" department, we have the racquet-smashing tantrum Ryan Harrison threw during his loss on Day 1 to Santiago Giraldo of Colombia. Harrrison would ordinarily have gotten a simple thumbs down yesterday (the incident escaped my attention until this morning) for making an ass of himself, because his actions reflect to some degree on the USA. But also because it wasn't like Harrison lost a third-set tiebreaker on a let-cord winner. He was waxed by a clay-courter, 7-5, 6-3.

However, today he gets a thumbs up for going on television during the long rain delay to apologize—sincerely and repeatedly (perhaps a little too much so, but you can hardly fault him for that)—during a chat with Olympics tennis host Pat O'Brien.

I thought Harrison's enthusiasm for making amends showed just how awful he felt about his meltdown, and his inability to control a temper that caused him to yell at ballboys and, ultimately, smash up his racquet. He seemed on the verge of tears at times during the interview, and while I make no apologies for the incident it also shows just how tense and tighly-wound Harrison was as a first-time Olympian. He's just 20, after all. Perhaps he and Tomic ought to go out together for a milkshake or a cherry Coke and commiserate.

I can't stand it when commentators and/or cameramen go ga-ga over celebrities who attend tennis matches, especially when they're more likely to be, say, Desperate Housewives than "First Woman in Orbit" types. Did I really need to see 30 shots of Chris Evert's former spouse, (golfer) Greg Norman, today?

But at least Norman, like Caroline Wozniacki's squeeze Rory McIlroy, is an accomplished athlete of sorts (if a golfer can be so described). But why the big deal over Chelsea Handler, who showed up to watch Maria Sharapova's match?  It was bad enough that it rendered some of the Bravo broadcast team awestruck (so I would learn; my own TV was muted at the time, so I missed the fuss). What was worse, I thought, was that Rennae Stubbs took up valuable time during the already brief on-court interview to ask Sharapova about it—by which time my sound was on again.

"You had a special guest in the player box today," Stubbs said, coyly.

Sharapova then explained who she'd gotten an email from "Chelsea" late the previous night; she was looking for tickets, and Maria replied, "Do you know how tough it is to get. . . Yadda-yadda-yadda" as if she didn't get a handful of guest-box passes to every match.

Apparently, Handler is "just Chelsea" to these folks, because that's how Stubbs also identified her, as a result of which and I ended up wasting 10 minutes of my precious life in a panic, Googling "Chelsea and Clinton and Maria Sharapova" to learn the identity of this mystery guest. I almost had a Ryan Harrison moment when I found out that Handler's a late night talking head, most famous (tennis-wise) for daring to ask Sharapova if she's a "b*tch."

Sharapova confirmed in that interview that she is, for those of you who were wondering.

!ThumbsdownPhilipp Kohlschreiber of Germany will crack the Top 20 for the first time in his career when the rankings come out on Monday, but he's paid a heavy price for playing in Kitzbuhel, Austria, this past week on red clay (losing in final to Robin Haase). And so has the winner, who's from the Netherlands. They are the only men from their respective nations in the Olympic men's singles draw.

Haase and Kohlschreiber were both due to fly to London tonight, with Haase set to play France's Richard Gasquet in his first-round match tomorrow, while Kohlschreiber was meant to face off against Blaz Kavcic—who's ranked in the 70s and needed an ITF wild card to get into the draw. Kohlschreiber, however, pulled a hamstring in the Kitzbuhel final, or so the story goes, and abandoned his place in the draw. He was replaced by Vardhan Vishnu of India, who was on site as Leander Paes's doubles partner, and is ranked No. 302 in singles.

Time was, Germany could place the maximum four players in the Olympics field, including two Wimbledon champs (Boris Becker and Michael Stich). Now, there won't be a single German man in the entire 64-playerdraw. The only consolation is that the German women probably have the best chance to put more than one woman on the singles medal podium than at any time since the heyday of Steffi Graf and Anke Huber.

Call me crazy, but is it worth missing the Olympics to play Kitzbuhel?

We'll see you tomorrow. The schedule is loaded!