Tennis is both brutal and beautiful

MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO 
Wimbledon is coming for the Olympics

Well, it wasn’t the plan, but here we are! We always knew that the transition from grass to clay would be tricky. But who imagined that the grass season would send so many players to rehab? I mean… I feel like a broken record about it, but it’s been way too many injuries. I don’t believe it’s only due to the grass this year, even if I agree it was bound to be more slippery with such wet weather. Novak Djokovic is also right to say it can get too slippery under these roofs. But Wimbledon also lands at the end of a crazy stretch that, for many players, can be traced back all the way to Indian Wells. So you get very tired bodies arriving on the trickiest surface, and here you go.

I don’t believe in coïncidence here, so the Tour would be wise to start looking into it. If you have missed the features already written about how those limbs are put at too much risk, it’s here and there. Most of the time, I’m really happy when I’m proved right. But this time, I’d have loved to be wrong.

So, where do we stand? Well, some top players are now in a race to avoid adding a withdrawal to the Olympics to their Wimbledon heartbreak.

• Australian Alex De Minaur looked like the definition of sadness on Wednesday when he came to the press to explain why he was withdrawing from his quarter-final against Novak Djokovic. “I'm devastated, but I had to pull out due to a hip injury, a little tear of the fiber cartilage that kind of is at the end or connects to the adductor. I felt a loud crack during the last three points of my match against Fils and got a scan yesterday, and it confirms that this was the injury and with, yeah, high risk of making it worse if I was to step on court. (…) I think this injury is more of a freak injury. It's an excessive amount of force made to slide on a grass court.” His recovery time is estimated between three and six weeks, and it will essentially depend on his pain level. Asked about his participation in the Olympics, De Minaur said, “If I'm completely honest, I don't know.” De Minaur had already missed the Games in Tokyo because of a Covid-19 positive test.
  

• One player who shouldn’t be able to take this spot for Australia in case De Minaur is unable to make it is Thanasi Kokkinakis, who slipped and injured a knee at Wimbledon.
  

• Another one who surely won’t be called if anything happens to Team USA is Madison Keys, who had to retire in the fourth round against Jasmine Polini after a left leg injury.

• Hubert Hurkacz left Wimbledon unable to walk after injuring a knee against Arthur Fils in the second round. The Polish player had surgery back in Poland on Tuesday, and he’s still hoping he can make it to Paris if he rehabs that knee twelve hours a day.
  

• Gaël Monfils is nursing a wrist injury after he fell during his third-round loss against Grigor Dimitrov.
  

• Jannik Sinner, during his quarter-final loss, looked like someone who should be tucked in bed with a hot beverage while fighting a bad cold. Sick and dizzy, the Italian has now pulled out of the Bastad tournament on clay in order to recover and give himself the best chance for the Olympics.
  

• Who can also be sure that Novak Djokovic’s knee will be able to get back to clay? It’s been incredible to see his recovery for Wimbledon, but even Djokovic has quickly admitted that not everything was perfect with that knee yet.

These injuries are even more bad news for the Olympics as they join a worrying trend of tennis players declining the tickets to the Games.

E. coli refuses to leave the Seine

As I keep saying to my foreign friends and colleagues, any Parisian would have told anyone ages ago that nobody should want to try to swim in La Seine… We wouldn’t put a toe in it. So swimming in the Seine for the Olympics always sounded either like a bad joke or an incredible belief about miracles. Yet, somehow, the project kept its legs, and it nearly made me believe that, yes, you could clean the Seine. Well, E.coli is saying “not so fast” right now and might ruin that dream.

Unsafe levels of E. coli (bacteria in fecal matter) are indeed still being found in the Seine. I know, not glamorous at all. Yet the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, swears the river will be clean on time and that she will even dive in it next week. Don’t you love that French bravado? Well, when you’ve spent nearly 1,5 billion euros on the project, you have to show some guts… But guts don’t come in the way of reason here, as a Plan B has finally been unveiled in case of bad weather or bacteria levels. Tennis players, if you’re told to try and have a dip in the Seine, keep saying no. As seen just above, you already have way enough to deal with. At least, we know the Seine will be used, whatever, as it’s the scene of the opening ceremony. Well, I mean, if nothing else goes extremely wrong, obviously.

WIMBLEDON
Tennis is both brutal and beautiful

A few weeks ago, Donna Vekic lost a match she should have won ten times (served for it twice, was 6-2 in the tie-break, among the rest) in the third round of Roland-Garros against Olga Danilovic. The Thursday before the tournament in Paris, she was even thinking of quitting tennis for a while. Had anyone told her she would reach the final in Bad Homburg and, most of all, the semi-finals at Wimbledon, Vekic would have signed up for it on the spot. It’s actually that dreadful loss in Paris that pushed her to keep going.

Yet, she was in tears after losing that semi-final against Jasmine Paolini despite being up a set and 3-1 in the third. She was so close to a unique opportunity that it erased, for now, all the journey to get there. But surely, in a few days or even weeks, the beauty of that sport will take over its brutality as Vekic sees how proud she can be of herself for reaching that semi-final and getting herself back on track as she was about to give up. She didn’t win that semi-final on Thursday, but she played the match of the tournament so far and still entered the records book of Wimbledon by playing in the longest-ever semi-final here (2h51).

And look at Barbora Krejcikova! I talked to her in Madrid, and she was in the middle of a rough streak of injuries and illness. She couldn’t find her game back. Well, the Czech will now play the second Grand Slam final of her career and her first at Wimbledon. The 2021 Roland-Garros champion beat Elena Rybakina, the 2022 Wimbledon champion who looked poised to win again this year. But Krejcikova beat the odds to get to a Wimbledon final, just like her mentor, Jana Novotna, whose spirit has never left her side. “She was telling me a lot of stories about her journey here and how she was trying to win Wimbledon. I was so far away when we had this talk. Now I am here and I am in a final. I remember thinking about her a lot. I have so many beautiful memories, and when I step on the court, I fight for every single ball as that is what she would want me to do,” Krejcikova told the TV on Centre Court.

And what about Jannik Sinner? He looked like the guy on his way to the trophy until his body gave up, and Daniil Medvedev finished the job. After losing an epic Roland-Garros final against Carlos Alcaraz. Yet, at the same time, he’s the World No.1 and is having the best year of his young career. Alcaraz, not too long ago, was crying about a right arm injury preventing him from playing the Barcelona Open: now he’s getting close to a Roland-Garros / Wimbledon double. Novak Djokovic? He tore his meniscus in Paris, had a part of it removed, spent three weeks in recovery, and now he’s basically as favorite for the Wimbledon title as Alcaraz. Yes, tennis is brutal, beautiful, and an emotional rollercoaster, and we’d want it in no other way.

QUESTION OF THE DAY 
Are you into the Games?

You were 62,50% to let me know that you felt tennis should launch a review of scheduling throughout the year.

BUSINESS / MEDIA 
Wimbledon’s bag under attack

• Sure, Wimbledon will survive, but a Grand Slam event is there to make money, not lose any. Yet, the weather over Wimbledon’s grass courts decided to test that fact by costing £250,500 to the tournament in refunds. How come? Well, it’s what happens when 75 matches out of 91 are getting canceled last Tuesday. The Guardian reports that “on Wednesday, the Met Office confirmed that more than a month’s rain – 52.6mm – had fallen in the first nine days of the championships, including 5.6mm recorded at nearby Kew Gardens on Tuesday.”
  

• I already told you about Nike’s shares tanking and all the bad tennis outfits with just a little silver lining. I have nothing against that brand, I swear. It gave us iconic tennis fashion and campaigns. But right, it’s on the struggle bus… What now? Well, FOS reports that Nike cut 700 jobs at its Beaverton, Ore., headquarters, 318 of which were executive positions. The job that nobody in this industry might want right now? Nike’s CEO John Donahoe’s job.
  

• On and off again… and on again? It seems so! CBS Sports should now be experiencing a lot of changes as it’s being reported that “National Amusements, the Shari Redstone family company that controls Paramount Global, said late Sunday that it has reached definite agreement on a merger deal with Skydance Media worth more than $8 billion.” David Ellison (yes, The Son Of) is Sykdance’s CEO.
  

• Serena Williams will host the ESPY Awards this Thursday, and she chatted about it and her upcoming documentary with Good Morning America.

SOME BREAK POINTS… 
The Rafa Has Landed

• Rafael Nadal is done with vacation and ready to roar on the clay again. Mission: Paris 2024. The King Of Clay, who will also play doubles here with Casper Ruud, arrived in Sweden on Wednesday.
  

• You knew there would be consequences when Carlos Alcaraz destroyed the ATP's new shot clock rule at the Queen’s. Players were not happy at all, felt nobody had consulted them, and that they were being rushed through the points. So, am I the only one thinking that ball kids being made to bring the towels to players again is a direct consequence? The ATP needed to find a way to give some time back to the players without doing a U-turn on its new rule, so…
  

• We’re having a whole news cycle about Novak Djokovic and the crowd again. And, yeah, it might have to be added to the saying. You know the one: death, taxes, and Djokovic-hits-back-at-the-crowd. Well, usually, we know that means he’s finishing with the trophy… So let’s see if this Wimbledon will follow the pattern.
  

• Novak Djokovic is, by the way, no longer the highest-paid player this year, as Carlos Alcaraz has taken the spot with $45 million in the bank through the last twelve months, reports Sportico. Djokovic earned $38.7 million in the same period. This includes prize money, endorsements, and appearance fees. Jannik Sinner ($25.7 million), Coco Gauff ($25.6 million) and Iga Świątek ($25.2 million) are rounding the Top 4. Not to forget, “Świątek had the highest prize money in tennis—male or female—during the first six months of 2024.”

EDITOR’S PICKS 

READ: How do you serve 50 tons of strawberries? Yes, 50 tons. That’s the amount served last year at Wimbledon, added to 281,151 hot meals. Impressive. So how do they do this and feed half a million people overall through the event? All the while “sourcing responsibly”? Well, NBC News wondered the same, so they inquired about it.

WATCH: What’s going on with Nike? Well, the Morning Brew is trying to explain it: