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Sunday, June 18, 2006

Wimbledon Wild Cards


I'm doing just a small post today--after a week-long feast of tennis and match reports, I need to scale back a bit. But I was intrigued by these stories about the Wimbledon wild cards. The AP has the names here, and although I'm puzzled by the inclusion of Romanian Andrei Pavel and wearily resigned to seeing Mark Philippoussis' name on the list, the men's choices feature the usual British journeymen.

The women's list is more interesting for junior fans, with Victoria Azarenka of Belarus, last year's ITF world junior champion, and Poland's Agnieszka Radwanska, the 2005 Wimbledon Junior champion and recent French Open Junior winner, the two non-British recipients. Naomi Cavaday is also a junior, a British one, and although she didn't get through qualifying for the French Junior Open, the 17-year-old has had success on the the Futures circuit and in junior events when she's played them. I am a big believer in Azarenka, but I have no idea why she would get a wild card from the AELTC, and Radwanska'a claim to one is similarly mysterious.
But what really opened my eyes was this story, in which I learned that it isn't the LTA that awards the wild cards, it's the club, and the new director of the LTA is not happy with their choices. It does seem that if you conduct a "wild card tournament," it defeats the purpose to then give most of the participants wild cards, regardless of the results. I guess I thought the LTA and the All-England Lawn Tennis Club were intermingled enough to be basically one and the same, but now I know that's not true. So how do they divvy up all that Wimbledon-generated revenue amicably?

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