Wed Aug 13 -- Tennis

After getting some water and orange juice, we headed over to the Olympic Greens for tennis. It was about 2:00 and the event started at 4:00. They encouraged everyone to be 2 hours early for the events to go through security and wait in lines. I assumed that 2 hours was overkill, but we decided to make sure we weren’t going to miss that event. So we headed over via subway. When we got to the Olympic Greens subway, they told us to use a City Busline instead which would ferry us over. After we got on the bus, I realized that there was no conveniently labeled subway-like stations on the bus, and hoped that we would know when to get off the bus. I had studied the maps ahead of time and knew that the Tennis Center was the furthest events on the Olympic Green, so I figured we could walk to get there if needed. Again, that would have been a huge mistake. What looked like a nice strolling walk amidst the greenery of the Olympic Greens was a huge distance amidst lots of concrete buildings. It seemed like it took us forever in the bus, and by the time we got out, it was very clear that we could never have walked that distance.

We then went through a pretty short line for security. Before leaving, I had loaded up my shorts pockets with fruit/nut bars and trail mix snack packets. You couldn’t really tell I had them in my pockets and I thought they would be good snacks for us to have during the afternoon and evening. The instructions were not to bring in any food, but I thought they wouldn’t notice something small like this. No metal detector would detect them. Well, I went through security and beeped the beeper. They wanded me and detected all my snacks?? I don’t know they have the ability to detect my packaged food, but they did. Every pocket. I lost all my food. I didn’t even get to eat any before I had to give it up. Darn.


We found our seats and for the first time relaxed for a bit before the matches started. We then noticed the sky – the pollution was very, very bad this day. The sky was a very sickly gray – kind of like the eerie aftermath of some of the movies where things have been destroyed. The whole sky was the same color, with barely the notion of any clouds or the existence of a sky. It continued like that the rest of the day. Wow.

But we had a great night of tennis! Our tickets were for a seat at Center Court, but then we had a grounds pass for the rest of the first week matches that evening. So we got to see some great players and great matches. The first match was Raphael Nadal (the number 1 player) versus a great Russian player. Absolutely amazing match. The Russian was ranked in the top 20 and seemed to be amazing. Nadal was that much better, returning absolutely every impossible shot – with pace and winners. The court was full and we had very, very good seats. The next match was Venus Williams vs a top 20 player from Belarus. We rushed down to the court when the previous match had just ended, so we basically got our pick of seats in the entire court. We picked the first row seats behind where Venus was playing, got out our American flags, and cheered the entire game and match. Sometimes she was as close as 10 feet to us. I’ve never seen a tennis match that close up. Felt like we were part of the game. She won! Yeah. Then we went to our Center Court seats where Roger Federer was playing a tough match. He of course, is the number 2 player in the world. He also pulled out a win. Finally, we watched Serena Williams take on a great player from France. The French player was playing awesome. They would get into power rallies and she would outhit Serena. Serena lost the first set. Emily asked me if I thought Serena would pull it out. I told her that champions usually find a way to win when they are not playing well. Emily doubted whether she could turn it around. But then Serena started to really hit even harder and hit some incredible shots. The French girl kept on playing great the whole time, but Serena was just a bit better. Serena won the second set and then in a close third set, she won as well. By the time we were done, it was past 10:00. There was actually one more round of matches scheduled, but we were very, very tired. We left for home, very happy and ready for sleep.