indiana wrote:

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JonH comes home wrote:

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Current medal table

www.paralympic.org/en/paris-2024-paralympics/medals/wheelchair-tennis

Only one discipline decided of 6, hopefully we can keep hold of a top 2 place by the end

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Not bad for one win. Though it is good to see relatively big fields ( look quite a bit bigger than at the Slams for the other wheelchair events, including the quad singles. All the best to our guys and hope it is all a great pverall experience.

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 Entry levels are a mixed bag and reduced a little by need to have pairs from a single country, meaning one or two players from weaker depth countries didnt get to play doubles.

For comparison with slams

Men's singles: 48-player draw - this is normally 16 in slams
Women's singles: 32-player draw - 16 in slams
Quad singles: 15-player draw - 8 in slams

Men's doubles: 20-team draw- 8 pairs in slams
Women's doubles: 13-team draw - 8 pairs in slams
Quad doubles: 6-team draw - 4 pairs in slams

So overall, somewhere over double the start list sizez we get in slams, which is good. As with all wheelchair events, though, the results largely follow seedings and there are very few upsets. Which doesnt detract from the top end quality of play but still shows the wide variety in standard between top and bottom. It is more like sports such as squash in terms of following the seedings than, say, pro level able bodied tennis   

indiana wrote:

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Interesting, and I see your point about the limiting effect the same country thing puts, particularly for quad doubles.

Re just how good the quality is, while I am sure all of us admire the competitors and some really do enjoy watching the events, as long as it is these generally similar limited fields I guess we just don't know how it would compare as against what could be produced by say anyone allowed to play wheelchair tennis with big resources put behind it as a sport.

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 The countries who are "big" in wheelchair tennis are really just a few - Netherlands and Japan lead the way now and historically, Britain as well, but then it falls off - China are putting more into it, USA and Australia have occasional big names, but arent in fact leading the way as you might expect to see, and then it is largely a hotch potch of players from places like Spain, Argentina, South Africa now, Israel (mainly in quad) and the like; Italy don't have a single player that I recall, France a lot less than reflects their position as a tennis leading nation, no one really from Germany, Russia, Czechia or Eastern Europe generally, nothing from Scandinavia really. Brazil are relatively strong in world terms compared to some other nations

So it is a few powerhouses (NL, Japan, GB, China now being the main ones that lead the way). NL and Japan over the years seem to have been the leaders and hosted a lot of major world events like the annual NEC Tour Finals and the World Team Cup, and NL and Japan and Britain will head the medals table here as well, almost certainly 

The other thing is that wheelchair tennis will clearly never be as big in depth as able bodied tennis - there arent enough disabled people playing tennis, it is a numbers game at that level. Quad even more so, as the players are much more disabled in lots of different ways. Andy Lapthorne for example as cerebral palsy, the Dutch guy Vink is a double amputee I think it was, and also has had his colon removed following colon cancer. He is the clear quad world number one. Sishole, the South African, lost 3 limbs in a train accident when he was young. 

Quad as a sport is severely limited in terms of numbers and so hard to tell how good the top players really are but , personally, I just find it inspiring to see what they do and the commitment they give (there is a danger of being patronising and I hope I dont come across like that!)