By Edmund Willison 25 April 2017 This week sees the return of the former darling of tennis, Maria Sharapova, after a 15-month drugs ban from professional sport. The highest earning woman in global sport plays as a wild card in the Porsche Grand Prix in Stuttgart from Wednesday. In the wake of her positive test early last year for a recently banned […]
Tennis
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From Matt Le Tiss to Mao’s last mistress: an Independent life
By Nick Harris 26 March 2016 Goodbye to The Independent as a newspaper, published on paper for the final time on Saturday. It’s been inevitable for some time. It won’t be the last paper […]
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“Tennis should be safe. That it should be humane should not even be up for discussion.”
By Alexandra Willis in Melbourne “Does Wimbledon have an extreme heat policy?” It was a perfectly innocent question. But if you’ve ever been to Wimbledon, you will understand why it was an amusing one. Rain delays, rather than heat delays, are a fact of SW19 life. The skies darken, the clouds let rip, the court […]
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Murrayball: how to gatecrash tennis’s golden era and become a Wimbledon contender
. Andy Murray’s obsession with self-improvement has propelled him from promising Scottish kid to one of the best tennis players in the world. In Hugh MacDonald‘s long-form essay ‘Murrayball: how to gatecrash the golden era’, we learn about his commitment to ‘marginal gains’, which is the process by which an athlete makes small improvements in many […]
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Fixing, doping, whistle-blowing: secrets that tennis prefers not to discuss
By Nick Harris 24 June 2013 As tennis’s most prestigious grass court tournament begins at Wimbledon today, the presence of one particular American qualifier in the men’s singles draw highlights the sport’s deeply complex relationship with match-fixing, doping and whistle-blowing. Wayne Odesnik, 27, is the world No107 and has previously been ranked inside the world’s […]
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Murray’s Brisbane win sets up a shot at an unprecedented Slam feat
By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 6 January 2013 Andy Murray won his first title of 2013 by retaining the Brisbane International on Sunday but will need to achieve an unprecedented feat in the Open era of tennis if he is to add the Australian Open title this month. The 25-year-old Scot […]
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Openly gay Olympians won six times as many golds as their peers. Why?
By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 22 August 2012 There were 23 openly gay athletes across all sports at the London 2012 Olympic Games according to observers who monitor such trends closely, notably Outsports.com. Ten of them won medals (43 per cent) and seven of them won gold medals (30.4 per […]
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London 2012: Better for Great Britain than 1908 despite fewer gold medals
By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 13 August 2012 The past few days we’ve heard that Great Britain has enjoyed its best Olympic medal haul since 1908 but in relative terms London 2012 was much better for the hosts. In 1908, there were only 2,008 competitors from 22 nations competing, and […]
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As Kaka hits 10m followers: the world’s 20 most popular sportsmen on Twitter
By Sportingintelligence 25 April 2012 Kaka has become the first sportsman in the world to amass 10 million followers on the micro-blogging website Twitter. As this report from the Associated Press detailed when the Real Madrid footballer passed the landmark, he tweeted: ‘Thank youuuuu. To celebrate I’ll make a twitcam’. Whatever that means. Love it […]
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EXCLUSIVE: Djokovic, Nadal, Federer – as close to perfection as tennis has ever been
By Nick Harris SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year 13 February 2012 The three-way rivalry in men’s tennis between Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer is the closest to perfection the sport has ever seen, according to new analysis by Sportingintelligence of every result in the 175 men’s singles Grand Slam tournaments of […]
