Mirra Andreeva and Diana Schneider will compete for a place in the final of the Olympic tennis tournament tonight. Sport Correspondent talks about the hope for a medal that was given to them by those from whom they were not expected.
Initially, Andreeva and Schneider were not supposed to play together at this Olympics at all. «We will form pairs based on the principle of a fusion of youth and experience,» said the wise president of the Russian Tennis Federation Shamil Tarpischev, announcing that Mirra would team up with Veronika Kudermetova, a semi-finalist at the Tokyo Games, and Diana would stand with Ekaterina Alexandrova. However, the evil commission of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for the admission of neutral athletes, having put a barrier on the path to Paris for almost all the leaders of Russian sports, also «rejected» Kudermetova's candidacy.
And everything had to be replayed. One of the best Russian pair skaters in history, Elena Vesnina, winner of gold and silver Olympic medals, was paired with Alexandrova. And Andreeva and Schneider were the second pair. And if anyone could be called contenders for the awards, it was not them.
The thing is that doubles tennis is a special discipline. First of all, it is clear that teamwork and mutual understanding play a huge role in it. Of course, you also need to hit the ball hard and accurately, but this will not be enough if the tennis players on the other side of the court skillfully intercept your shots at the net, anticipating their direction. Hence the second important factor for success in doubles: experience. It is not for nothing that many famous doubles players played at the highest level until they were over 40 years old. For obvious reasons, you need to run half as much as in singles, and with each new year of your career, your game sense only grows.
That's why for Andreeva and Schneider, who are younger than Vesnina alone, the Olympic doubles tournament initially seemed like a kind of backup option. Both have recently been making rapid progress in singles. Mirra, at 17, is called a future superstar, and Diana, who is three years older, is also getting plenty of compliments about her future. And on the eve of the Games, both Mirra and Diana won singles titles, respectively, at tournaments in Iasi (Romania) and Budapest.
But in Paris, both of them did not have a good time in the individual tournament. Two months ago, Andreeva reached the semi-finals of the French Open on the courts of Roland Garros, but here she was eliminated in the first round by Magda Linnett from Poland. Schneider beat the Italian Elisabetta Cocciaretto with some difficulty — but only to then lose the match to the Chinese Wang Xiyu without a chance. Andreeva also lost in the opening round of the tournament in the mixed doubles together with Daniil Medvedev. And Mirra and Diana obviously did not go out to the first match in the doubles in the best mood — realizing that they had one last and extremely unclear opportunity to fight for an Olympic medal.
But tennis is wonderful because it doesn't let you grieve for a long time over a defeat. You don't wait a year for a new chance, but a few days at most. And the Russian girls took advantage of it in a way no one expected. In the first match, Andreeva and Schneider overcame the strong Australians Ajla Tomljanovic and Olivia Gadecki in a decisive super tiebreak, and then literally swept the fifth-seeded Canadians Gabriela Dabrowski and Leyla Fernandez off the court, giving them only four games. What's remarkable is that both pairs defeated by the Russians are specialists in this discipline.
But even after such success, Mirra and Diana did not look like favorites in the quarterfinals against the winners of the last Olympics in doubles – Barbora Krejcikova and Katerina Siniakova from the Czech Republic. Even though they had not played together for a long time and teamed up again shortly before the Paris Games – this is a classic pair with all its trump cards in the form of knowledge of the smallest tactical nuances. Which should have given the Czechs a decisive advantage.
But, as it turned out, nuances are nothing if you are going up against two strong and good-naturedly impudent young stars, and you make mistakes time after time. Andreeva and Schneider did not even have to be particularly clever: both consistently hit the back line, time after time outplaying their opponents who tried to combine, but at the same time allowed a huge number of mistakes. At the same time, when it was necessary, they also wove elegant networks of rallies that drove their few, but clearly audible fans present on court number 7 into ecstasy. And in the end, as in the previous match, they got by with just two sets to leave the Olympic doubles tournament without the current champions.
At the same time, a match was going on to determine Andreeva and Schneider's opponents in the semi-finals, and here a very unpleasant situation for them could have arisen: the Ukrainians Lyudmila and Nadezhda Kichenok, under the occasional nationalistic cries of inadequate fans, confidently led Christina Buksha and Sara Sorribes-Tormo from Spain in the decisive super tie-break. I don't even want to imagine what kind of insults from the stands the young Mirra and Diana would have had to listen to during the match for reaching the final, if the Spanish women had not miraculously snatched victory from the Ukrainian duo.
But now, I would like to hope that unsportsmanlike factors will not prevent Andreeva and Schneider from having a decent end to the Olympic Games. However, it is difficult to predict whether they will be able to win a medal: if women's singles are considered an unpredictable discipline, then women's pairs are even more so. In terms of individual skill, the Russians are obviously superior to their semi-final opponents. Now it remains to find out what the sum of these components will be.
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