Hopp Suiss!!

Olympic Tennis

Thanks to Andrew and Jessica, we spent a fun-filled Saturday watching tennis at the 2008 Olympics from just behind the baseline.

We saw Chinese favorite Li Na get knocked out by her Russian opponent in the first match. The Chinese fans could not help themselves with respect to court etiquette and kept on shouting "Zhong Guo, Jia You" (Go China!) at the top of their lungs at any (in)opportune time. More than once, Chinese fans violently popped bags of meat-flavored potato chips when the Russian, Dinara Safina, was serving. It got so bad that one of the Russian coaches lost it and started yelling at the judge for failing to control the crowd. Safina maintained her composure, however, mostly by making wierd noises whenever she returned a shot from Li.

The men's bronze match was pretty good too. Third-ranked Novak Djokovich got so pumped up about his match against James Blake, who had just knocked out top-seed Roger Federer from the men's singles competition, that when he messed up a random rally, he proceeded to channel Pete Townsend and destroy his tennis racket. He was a little too camera-happy, particularly in light of a display at the end of the match where he sunk to his knees and got all "emotional."

Finally, we saw the gold medal match for men's doubles, also known as "Federer-fest." The (formerly) anointed one was in good form, delivering murderous serves down the half-court line to cheers of "Hopp Suiss!," himself yelling "Allez!!!" whenever he scored a particularly good point. When they won, Federer practically started making out with his teammate, Wawrinka.

This week we have tickets to see Christian Smith run the 800m for the United States. But we also learned from Andrew that our tickets would have allowed us to see medal-favorite and national hero Liu Xiang run before thousands of crazed Chinese fans. Too bad that he just withdrew with a hamstring injury...