Olympics offering points (apparently it was in doubt before now)

indiana · Tennis legend

RE: Olympics offering points (apparently it was in doubt before now)

Salmon · Tennis legend

Forget tennis being there... I don't even like the concept of Olympics (or any multisport event or award) because it's hard to define what a 'sport' is. Besides - it's not fair that in sports like football, you can win only one medal, but you can get 8 or so swimming. So a swimmer always has more value and hence is always better than a tennis player or a footballer - brilliant...

But in a way it's good to see tennis in Olympics. Today's game is dominated by money - officials, players, tournament organisers - that's all anyone cares about. In a sport where you often get more for turning up and tanking your first round match than for winning the title, it's surely refreshing to see people play for glory and national pride alone.

Of course, glory = future money, but that's being too much of a cynic!

I agree with the Grand Slams being all that matters. Plus, it's not good that you can't defend these points next year, even if you win a title that week...

-- Edited by Greenleaf at 18:26, 2008-07-03

GavinUK · Lower Club Player

I was surprised that they didn't adopt the round-robin approach for the Olympics. For the lower ranked players, this once (maybe twice) in a lifetime opportunity could be over in less than an hour.

Not sure about awarding any points at all for the Olympics, I think it should be just about winning a medal. I don't honestly think it would stop many top player from showing up. But as they have decided to award points, surely you shouldn't get 5 points just for showing up? It's not like a main tour event where all the players have to be at a certain level in the rankings. There are some a few players ranked 400 - 600 that will suddenly get 5 points all at once that they never would have been able to achieve otherwise.

Though perhaps the same can be said for some of the WC's given out to players from the host nation for any main tour event.

So my personal view is it should just be about winning a medal and points shouldn't have been awarded. But I'm sure there were reasons for how they decided to do it.

-- Edited by GavinUK at 18:11, 2008-08-08

Madeline · Admin:Moderator + Tennis Legend

Apparently Bhupathi has been complaining about the doubles seedings, which take into account singles ranking and that works against established doubles pairs.

I'm surprised they have seeding in the Olympics anyway. I thought the idea was that everybody should start from a level field? Do any other sports in the Olympics give some sort of preference to top participants?

john · Top national player

I would assume they surely have seedings in the Badminton and Table Tennis etc. but not certain about this.

steven · Tennis legend

They have seedings in all of those plus even things like athletics, e.g. making sure all the top runners aren't in the same heats.