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Итоги сезона 2011 - ATP и WTA

 

For Men, 2011 Was a Tennis Season for the Ages

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

Published: December 8, 2011

 

BOSTON  — With the off-season lasting less than a month, it is best not to tarry when it comes to analyzing the tennis year that just ended in the sybaritic Andalusian city of Seville.

They will be trading hip-wrenching forehands again soon enough on the circuit (and they still are in exhibitions and in Australian Open wild-card playoffs), but what to make of all the extended rallies and debates of 2011?

It was, rather unexpectedly, the season of Novak Djokovic, who could have been excused for feeling sated and sluggish at the start of the year after winning the Davis Cup for Serbia — and building up national pride there — in 2010. Instead he used that moment as a private launching pad to a 43-match winning streak, three Grand Slam singles titles and a record five Masters 1000 titles before tearing an intercostal muscle and running out of steam in the autumn.

His overall record of 70-6 was not quite in the same mathematical class as Jimmy Connors’s 99-4 in 1974, John McEnroe’s 82-3 in 1984 or Roger Federer’s 81-4 in 2005, but it nonetheless was a stupendous body of work in this top-heavy era.

This was also the year the women’s game went global in earnest: with Li Na of China becoming the first Asian player to reach the singles final of a Grand Slam tournament at the Australian Open and then taking her history-making to the next level by winning the French Open. That it came on her least favorite surface — clay — actually made some sense in that Li clearly has issues handling big expectations, both hers and others, as she proved by compiling a 7-9 record after her Roland Garros triumph.

So it went for the W.T.A., where consistent brilliance was as elusive as peace and quiet in a Victoria Azarenka match. By the time the season ended, Li had split with her Danish coach, Michael Mortensen, who had helped her win in Paris, just as Djokovic had split with Igor Cetojevic, the bearded doctor and unconventional cheerleader whom Djokovic had credited with calming his mind and solving some of his health and endurance issues by recommending a gluten-free diet and other treatments.

But to draw too many parallels between the men’s and women’s games in 2011 would be misleading. This will go down as one of finest men’s seasons of the Open era. Despite Li’s breakthrough at age 29 and Petra Kvitova’s convincing victory at Wimbledon, it was not the same sort of rah-rah year for the women.

The gender gap, above all, came down to duels. The biggest stars in the men’s game — Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Djokovic and Andy Murray — loom particularly large at the moment, and they kept squaring off in major matches of often stunning quality. Federer’s streak-stopping victory over Djokovic in the twilight in the French Open semifinals, and Djokovic’s victory over Nadal in a U.S. Open final full of video-game-worthy rallies, were particularly essential viewing.

Meanwhile, the top women, hardly lacking in talent, struggled to build even one resonant rivalry in a year when their tour’s biggest star, Serena Williams, played only 25 matches and missed two-thirds of the season because of complications from a foot injury and a pulmonary embolism that forced her to seek emergency treatment in Los Angeles.

Though Williams has too seldom been a steady wind in her long, intermittently phenomenal career, the tour’s continuity problems were hardly all about her in 2011. Kim Clijsters, a sentimental favorite with global reach, looked set to keep gathering momentum after beating Li to win the Australian Open in January. But injuries kept her from playing another Grand Slam tournament.

So much for building interest and rivalries around her, but at least Clijsters plans to give it another whirl in 2012. Her Belgian compatriot and rival Justine Henin, a purist’s delight who was the best women’s player of the 2000s not named Williams, retired abruptly for the second time in January after doctors determined that her damaged right elbow was too fragile for the powerful forces at work in the modern game.

Venus Williams, who, like Henin, has won seven Grand Slam singles titles, also appears to be in danger of forced retirement. She, like her younger sister, played little in 2011 and eventually revealed at the U.S. Open that she has been struggling with Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that she says has sapped her energy.

For now, Venus Williams — age 31 and ranked 104 — will attempt to play on. So will Serena, her prospective Olympic doubles partner, who remains, despite all her own troubles, the gold standard for 21st century women’s tennis.

Serena Williams still managed to finish 12th in the rankings in 2011 and to reach the U.S. Open final, where she lost both her temper and the match against a suddenly all-business Sam Stosur. But Serena’s 22-3 match record did give her the tour’s best winning percentage, 88 percent, ahead of Kvitova’s 83.6 percent.

In a season when four different women won the Grand Slam singles titles, Kvitova was rightfully player of the year. She won Wimbledon in style, dominating the final against the much more experienced Maria Sharapova, whose serving issues continue to hold her back. Kvitova later won the year-end championships and then the Fed Cup with the Czech Republic. She is an imposing if hardly haughty left-hander who can generate crushing power and acute angles with her serve, forehand and two-handed backhand. But she has relatively limited mobility in an era that would seem to require great athleticism and has had disquietingly poor results of late on hard courts, which remain the tour’s base surface.

She is, however, at age 21 a player with plenty of upside and the only member of generation next to have won a major title. Caroline Wozniacki, Azarenka and Agnieszka Radwanska are still on hold. Wozniacki continues to rack up weeks at No. 1, even if she has not reached a Grand Slam singles final since 2009.

It has required a strange chain of misadventures and events indeed for Wozniacki to finish No. 1 for two straight seasons, providing the illusion of stability at the top of a women’s game that has had so little. The longest winning streak of 2011 for any woman was just 12 matches.

At least the W.T.A. has true stability at the top in the board room with Stacey Allaster, the tour’s chief executive, renewing her contract through 2017. The leading men, despite all their collective appeal, could not convince Adam Helfant to renew as the head of the A.T.P. Tour and are struggling to agree on his replacement.

The real clout, of course, continues to reside with the four Grand Slam tournaments, and yet there were hints of a power shift in 2011 as Federer, Nadal and company successfully — or so it seems — applied pressure on U.S. Open officials to reconsider their television-driven schedule.

Whether the men can extract a greater percentage of revenue from the Slams remains much less certain, but there can be no argument that, with Djokovic leading the way by breaking serve after serve, they provided great entertainment value for the money in 2011.

 

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