RAONIC IN THE SPOTLIGHT WHILE BOUCHARD LOOKS TO BOUNCE BACK
There are stops on the London Tube rail line called Wimbledon Park and Wimbledon. Neither is the right stop for The Championships, which I learned the hard way Sunday.
The proper Tube station is Southfields — one stop before the two Wimbledons. From the Southfields station, it’s a beautiful 12-minute walk along Wimbledon Park Road to the All-England Club on Church Road.
The road to the club is like something out of a movie set: Tree-lined with old English row houses on one side and gated stand-alone homes on the other. You can smell the gardens behind the manicured hedges. It seems almost too beautiful to be real, but you need to stay alert when crossing the street, with traffic coming in the wrong direction.
Before the exterior of the Centre Court stadium comes into sight, you can hear tennis balls being pounded on the 22 practice courts behind the wrought-iron fences and hedges of the oldest tennis tournament in the world, started in 1877.
It was on the No. 5 practice court where Westmount’s Eugenie Bouchard was Sunday afternoon, hitting balls with Turkey’s Cagla Buyukakcay for about an hour. Watching Bouchard’s every move ever so closely was coach Nick Saviano, who began working with the 22-year-old again in April. Saviano started coaching Bouchard when she was 12, but she dropped him after her successful 2014 season when she advanced to the semifinals at each of the Australian and French Opens and made the final at Wimbledon before losing 6-3, 6-0 to the Czech Republic’s Petra Kvitova.
The odds of Bouchard making it back to Centre Court for the women’s final at the end of this special tennis fortnight are slim. After climbing to as high as No. 5 in the world rankings in 2014, Bouchard is now No. 48 and lost her first-round match here last year in straight sets (7-6, 6-4) to Chinese qualifier Ying-Ying Duan. The British bookmakers have Bouchard listed at between 33-1 and 50-1.
As she left the practice court Sunday afternoon, Bouchard was asked if she had a couple of minutes to talk. She politely said she didn’t have time because she was headed to another training session, but added: “Try me again tomorrow.”
Bouchard will be back on the practice courts today, since her first-round match isn’t until Tuesday, when she will face Slovakia’s Magdalena Rybarikova, who is ranked No. 92.
Saviano will surely be on the practice courts watching Bouchard’s every move again Monday. But Bouchard no longer demands the attention she used to from others both on and off the court. When she arrived for her afternoon practice session Sunday wearing a white Nike T-shirt and dark purple shorts with her blond hair in a ponytail, only a few of the cameramen in place at the court entrances focused their lenses on her. A little while later, the cameramen were tripping over each other as they chased Novak Djokovic while the No. 1 men’s player headed to his practice session.
Djokovic will be the main attraction here as he looks to take the third step toward completing the calendar Grand Slam with wins already at the Australian and French Opens, and the U.S. Open waiting in September. The last man to do that was Rod Laver in 1969. Djokovic already holds all four titles after winning Wimbledon and the U.S. Open last year.
“Obviously, I’m at the peak of my career at the moment,” said the 29-year-old Djokovic, who will play Great Britain’s James Ward, ranked No. 177, on Monday. “It hopefully can still keep going. I see still lots of room for improvement, things that I can work on. That’s something that encourages me. That’s something that keeps me grounded in a way, gives me more reason to practise.”
On the women’s side, the main focus will be on top-seeded Serena Williams, the defending champion and a six-time winner here who starts Monday against Croatia’s Donna Vekic, ranked No. 112.
“I’m feeling pretty good,” the 34-year-old Williams said. “I don’t feel any pressure or stress.”
The same can’t be said for Bouchard.
Canadian tennis fans will also be watching Milos Raonic of Thornhill, Ont., who has a legitimate shot at the men’s title. The 6-foot5 tower of power is seeded sixth, and the eight-millimetre grass surface will make his serve even harder to return.
Raonic has also been working with three-time Wimbledon champion John McEnroe as a coaching consultant to improve the finer points of his game, including going more to the net. The British bookmakers have Raonic listed at between 12-1 and 14-1 odds.
“It’s a very different story this year,” Raonic, who plays his first match Monday against 45thranked Pablo Carreno Busta of Spain, told The Canadian Press on Saturday. “I feel like I’ve done all the right things and put myself in position. Now is the opportunity to make it count.”
Bouchard also spoke with The Canadian Press Saturday, saying she’s trying to forget what happened here last year.
“I’ve done a much better preparation,” she said. “I feel much better physically I’ve gotten in more matches on grass and feel like I’m on the right path with my coaching situation as well.”
Monday is a huge day for sports fans in Britain, with Wimbledon getting started in the morning and England playing Iceland at night in the Round of 16 at the Euro soccer tournament. But the big front-page headlines are still about England voting last week to leave the European Union, including the Sunday Times with “After Brexit, what now?”
Times are tense and it took three hours to get through U.K. border customs early Sunday morning at Heathrow Airport. And after making the walk from Southfields station to the AllEngland Club, I was stopped en route to getting my accreditation by a very polite British man in a blue suit who was joined by two security guards in uniform. Apparently, I had been picked up on surveillance cameras outside, stopping, taking photos and writing in my notebook. He wanted to know what I was doing.
I showed him my passport and told him it was my first time covering Wimbledon, but he still politely asked to see my notebook.
I didn’t tell him I originally got off at the wrong station.