* !PicBy Pete Bodo*
Less than a month after this year's trophy presentation at Wimbledon, the top players will return to London and the All England Club for another go-round on the grass. But this time the stakes will not be a couple of million dollars but the shiny gold medal that so many of the world's greatest athletes covet and have a chance to earn just once every four years. We're talking about the Olympic Games.
Two WTA stars with lengthy resumes and high name value are among those hoping to win gold in early August this year, and each began her drive toward that goal after a long hiatus today at the Sony Ericsson Open.
Kim Clijsters, 28 and increasingly injury-prone, hadn't played a competitive match since the Australian Open, where she helped create the monster that is Victoria Azarenka. Hobbled by a tender ankle, Clijsters lost to Azarenka in the semifinals at Melbourne. In the interim she's been taking care of the ankle and preparing to return, but you get the sense that she was in no great hurry to get back in time to play Bogota, Monterrey, or Memphis. In her return today, she overcame a shaky start to eliminate Jamila Gajdosova, 4-6, 6-1, 6-0.
"The Olympics is what I'm focused on now," Clijsters told the press after surviving the scare. "And, you know, where I kinda said, 'Okay, this is the long term goal that I set when I started playing again.'"
Clijsters had been eligible for two previous Olympic games but missed both. She was in a cast following wrist surgery in 2004 (Athens), and in 2008 (Beijing) she had just given birth to her daughter, Jada. This is her last shot at Olympic glory, and she's built her schedule around it. It will be good to keep that in mind as she progresses through the year, for she's already expressed some reservations about the workload coming up. It's one thing to go into a big event like the Olympics well-seasoned and match tough. It's quite another to limp in, beat up and potentially hurt.
"I want to try and do really well, and that's why we have a tough summer ahead," Clijsters said. "With the French Open and Wimbledon and, you know, changing surfaces there a couple of times in such a short amount of time, it puts a lot of pressure, you know, on our bodies . . "
In other words, maybe we shouldn't expect too much from her in the run-up to Wimbledon Part II this year—especially because the combination of her ranking (presently No. 37) and her status as the No. 2 Belgian (behind No. 33 Yanina Wickmayer, but still some 125 places better than the No. 3 Belgian, Kirsten Flipkens) almost guarantees Clijsters a place in the singles draw. The cutoff for Olympics eligibility is a computer ranking of No. 56 at the beginning of June, and four is the maximum number of competitors from any given nation.
The other familiar face who opened her drive for Olympic games eligibility on Wednesday was Venus Williams; she crushed Kimiko Date-Krumm, 6-0, 6-3. Williams is a three-time Olympic games gold medalist. She won the singles and doubles (w/Serena Williams) in Sydney (2000), and repeated the doubles win with Serena eight years later in Beijing.
Venus will be 32 by the London Games. She's fallen to No. 134 in singles (No. 10 among American players) and is unranked in doubles. She last played singles at the U.S. Open last September, and that was just one of four tournaments she entered in 2011. She's also engaged in a continuing struggle with the auto-immune disease, Sjogren's Syndrome.
The selection process for Wimbledon contains loopholes; the USTA may choose to "nominate" Venus and Serena for one of the eight special "ITF places" (if I understand the system, they're kind of like wild cards), even if, stastically, they're nowhere near the second-best doubles team in the U.S. (Liezel Huber and Lisa Raymond are the top doubles team in the world and Nos. 1 and 2 respectively in the doubles ranking; Vania King is No. 6, but plays with various partners).
Many American women also dream of Olympic glory, but are living in a state of anxiety about just how the doubles selection will work out—given that Venus and Serena are eager to play the Olympics and and have represented the nation with great success and distinction in the past. Is that enough reason to nominate them over women who currently rank ahead of them, and given how little either Williams sister has played, ought they get an automatic nomination based on rep and resume?
"My goal is to peak for the Olympics," Venus said after her win, echoing Clijsters.
I have the feeling that many USTA officials and other interested parties are keeping their fingers crossed that when Venus says "peak," she means playing her way up the kind of form that would justify nomination regardless of any other factors.