The fall-out from Britain’s Davis Cup flop in Lithuania has reached the corridors of political power with a group of tennis-loving Members of Parliament and peers examining the state of the sport.
Britain’s lack of success has long been a source of embarrassment and now the All-Party Parliamentary Tennis Group, which brings together members of the House of Commons and House of Lords, is gathering evidence to try and find out where it is all going wrong.
“There clearly are critics out there who have got a view that things aren’t going well,” British Sports Minister Gerry Sutcliffe said from Vancouver where he is attending the Paralympics.
“This is an opportunity for the LTA [British Lawn Tennis Association] to set out its stall, for the all-party group to interview those people with an alternative or opposing point of view and then for a positive result to come out from that to go back to the LTA and say where potential gaps may be,” he said.
FIERCE DEBATE
The defeat by Lithuania, a nation with just three world-ranked players, all of them teenagers, two weeks ago sparked fierce debate about the LTA’s failure to produce top-level performers.
Apart from world No. 4 Andy Murray, who spent his formative years training in Spain, Britain has no other men in the top 150 of the ATP rankings.
Sutcliffe supports the all-party group while the much-maligned LTA said it welcomed the chance to show how it was spending some of its £50 million-plus (US$75.83 million) annual budget on grassroots tennis.
The sports minister was critical of British tennis last year when nine out of 10 home players lost in the first round of Wimbledon.
The LTA defended its progress on Monday, pointing to a recent Sport England survey that showed tennis was one of four sports with increased participation levels.
It also said 100,000 tennis rackets were being provided to schools.
‘REGULAR CONTACT’
“We are in regular contact with the All-Party group and recommended a meeting last November,” an LTA spokesman said.
“This exchange of views is an excellent opportunity for us to get across the work British tennis is doing at the grassroots level of the sport,” he said.
The tennis group was not originally intended to monitor the performance of the Davis Cup team. Its official purpose is “for members of parliament and peers to be able to play tennis matches together and compete with various outside teams”.
Britain, without Murray, lost 3-2 to Lithuania and now face a relegation playoff at home to Turkey in July to avoid dropping into Euro Africa Group III, the bottom tier of the men’s team competition.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier