The Olympic tennis tournament in Rio, which will run a week and a half in early August, has been plagued by a few injuries and, mostly, pullouts due to a combination of factors. Some players are worried about the Zika virus. Other players (some outwardly expressing fears about Zika) are reluctant to play a tournament which doesn’t pay prize money, especially since traveling to Brazil is a detour from the rest of the North American summer hardcourt season. Players don’t want to travel from Canada to Rio and then back to Cincinnati, which is the main tour stop the following week after the Olympic tennis tournament ends. Other players want to be rested for Cincinnati, the big lead-in to the U.S. Open.
Several high-profile pullouts exist for both the men and the women in Rio. Two of each will be noted here:
Simona Halep
There was a time when this would have had a bigger impact on the field: two years ago. Halep was a force that summer, having made the Wimbledon semifinals and showing she was a strong all-surface player. These days, Halep did make the Wimbledon quarterfinals in 2016, but she needed Madison Keys to get injured in the third set of a fourth-round match in order to see her way through. She has clearly not been as impressive as she was in 2014, when she opened eyes across the tennis world and seemed to be a lock to win a Grand Slam title in the near future. Not only has that Grand Slam title not occurred; Halep has regressed. She won her home-nation tournament in Bucharest, Romania, a few weeks ago, but that came against a very weak field. Her absence from the Olympics won’t be as big of a game-changer as one might have thought in previous months.
Victoria Azarenka
The absence of Azarenka from the Olympics, while she manages her pregnancy and prepares for childbirth, is a much more significant development than Halep. Azarenka was injured in the spring, and as a result, Serena Williams regularly made the finals of various tournaments, while other players occasionally made the finals opposite the 22-time major champion. In truth, though, given the pregnancy and the scare of the Zika virus, it’s very likely that Azarenka would have skipped this trip anyways.
Azarenka won Indian Wells and Miami earlier this year. She showed that she was one of the three best players in the world, the one who could stand up to Serena as well as Angelique Kerber. With her exit from the Olympics, Kerber is the odds-on favorite to challenge Serena for a gold medal in women’s singles.
Milos Raonic
The story with Raonic is that after making the Wimbledon final, he wants to be able to win the Canada Masters, which end just before Rio begins. That’s a tight travel schedule, and Raonic obviously wanted to be in his home country to sell tickets for local organizers and also win his first Masters title. This is a big absence, one which should make it easier for the top six players to dominate the medal podium in Brazil. Raonic’s exit certainly helps Roger Federer, who lost to the Canadian in the Wimbledon semifinals. Raonic is a player on the up-and-up, and he could have easily been one of the three players than lands on the podium in Rio.
Tomas Berdych
Berdych is a player who regularly makes quarterfinals of events, so he was not a top medal threat in Brazil. However, if anyone ranked above him lost in the early rounds, he naturally had a very good chance to make the semifinals and likely play for a bronze medal. Berdych’s absence gives someone else a decent chance to be a bronze medal threat. For him, he probably figured that he doesn’t have a real chance to podium and that there is so many other problems in the country, so why risk it? And plus, winning an average tournament will have a much bigger financial reward for him than chasing a medal. It was a fairly easy decision for him.
