Digging out statistics that shame British tennis is too easy to be much fun. But here’s one that’s a bit different: the number of British women in the world’s top 100: nil; number of women whose surnames end in ”ova” in the world’s top 100: 16. And 19 in the Wimbledon draw.
How can this be? What is it with these -ovas? Why will there be so many more of them (and that’s not to mention the -evas and -ayas) at Wimbledon this year than there are players from the host nation? They are questions that are less flippant than they may seem, and, in fact, raise a serious issue, according to one top British coach.
First, though, a brief examination of who the -ovas are. The ending, which denotes a female (the Czech player Helena Sukova’s father was Cyril Suk), is used in all the Slavonic languages, so crops up in many parts of Central and Eastern Europe.
Strictly speaking, the suffix means ”the property of”, which is why not everyone approves. Its application can have comical consequences, including the film Kramer vs Kramer being issued as Kramer vs Kramerova when it was shown in Czechoslovakia and references to, among others, Julia Robertsova and Meryl Streepova when films are discussed in the press.
The Czechs are said to be the most rebellious about its obligatory application, but so far demands that it should be made optional have only gained exemption for foreigners. ”To get rid of it altogether would be a rape of the language,” says Jaroslava Pecirkova, of the Czech language department at the Academy of
Science in Prague. ”The advantage is that it’s immediately clear by someone’s name whether they are male or female.”
And what the proliferation of -ovas in tennis’s world rankings graphically illustrates is how Eastern Europe is churning out a disproportionate number of top players to the area it covers.
Alan Jones, who coached Jo Durie when she reached the world’s top five in the 1980s and now looks after the British number two, Elena Baltacha, gives two reasons for the high number of East Europeans making it on the women’s circuit while sightings of British women in the top 100 in the past two decades have been minimal.
The first is economic. ”Which sport gives the opportunity for women to earn money like tennis?” Jones asks. ”There’s only one other and that’s golf, but there are virtually no golf courses in the Eastern bloc. So if you are going to get out of a particularly unpleasant background in your homeland — that is, you’re not living in a very wealthy environment and you have an athletic daughter — I’m pretty sure the majority pursue tennis first.”
Secondly, Jones reckons that parents rather than coaches drive their aughters. ”That means it’s much more hands-on as far as discipline is concerned. The ability to administer a clip round the ear isn’t so easy for a coach. If I approached things in the manner they do in Eastern Europe I could be done under the Child Protection Act in Britain.”
A third reason, not advanced by Jones, is almost certainly the lead given by one of the greatest of all players, herself an -ova, Martina Navratilova. She was born in Prague in 1956 and played at the top of the game for nearly two decades, crucial years when professional tennis transmuted from being a minority interest to a global industry. Navratilova alerted generations of parents and children to the possibilities that the sport offered.
Daniela Hantuchova, of Slovakia, the highest-ranked of the present generation of -ovas, admits the role that Navratilova played in her own fascination with the game, but thinks it goes beyond the example of just one role model. ”I think it’s the hunger to prove that we can play good tennis, too, and we can work
really hard, even though the conditions in my country are a long way behind what you’ve got in Britain,” she says. ”We are only now completing our first tennis centre [in Bratislava].”
She also believes that limited public facilities were, perversely, a spur to her career. ”When I started playing as a six-year-old [under the tutelage of her grandmother, who still plays at 76], I was able to play for only one hour a week at six o’clock in the morning in winter. But in a way it was good because I enjoyed it even more when I had the chance to play.”
So far, only two -ovas have won grand-slam titles, Navratilova and Hana Mandlikova, another citizen of Prague, who claimed each of the big four titles except Wimbledon in the 1980s. The odds of another doing so in the near future must be short given the numbers massing in the top 100, although Hantuchova, given her well-publicised weight problem, which she protests is not anorexia, may struggle to be the next.
Nor will too many people invest in its being the best known of the -ovas, Anna Kournikova, who since being a Wimbledon semifinalist at 16 in 1997 has managed to achieve an exponential divergence in the amount of
success she has and the money she makes.
More likely, on current form, to succeed the great Martina is Nadia Petrova, a 21-year-old Russian with an aggressive game. She reached the semifinals of the French Open in Paris earlier this month, winning a quarterfinal against her countrywoman Vera Zvonareva, who in the previous round had seen off Venus Williams. It is the sort of form line that makes her an outside threat at Wimbledon.
Then there is the latest of the -ovas to enter the top 100, Maria Sharapova, who has already been lumbered with the deadly sobriquet ”the new Kournikova”, the inevitable consequence of being blonde, pretty and Russian. So far the 16-year-old, given a wild-card entry into Wimbledon, has made as many headlines for grunting loudly as her tennis, but her victory over the good French player Nathalie Dechy in Birmingham two weeks ago gave substance to claims that she can become a top-10 player.
More certain than that, though, is that the success of so many -ovas is no mere coincidence, and provides a fascinating, possibly disturbing, clue as to what is needed to create a modern tennis achiever. —