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Murray’s Brisbane win sets up a shot at an unprecedented Slam feat

Sunday, January 6th, 2013

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 won his first Grand Slam singles title at the US Open in 2012, having earlier won the Olympic singles title in his finest season to date.

But no male first-time Slam winner in the Open era has ever added a second Slam of their career in the next Slam event.

Murray can make history with a win in Melbourne but his task is put in perspective by the fact nobody has done it in the 44 years of Open tennis since 1968. John Newcombe, just before the Open era, did it at Wimbledon and the US Open in 1967.

(Before that, the last time any man followed up a first Slam win with his second in the next Slam was in 1956 when Lew Hoad won the Australian Open and then the French Open. But that was at a time when all the Australian Open competitors were Australian except four).

Up to and including Murray, there have been 49 different first-time Grand Slam winners in the Open era.

Of the 48 before Murray, 25 of them have gone on to win multiple Slam titles, and 23 have won only one title.

Of those multiple Slam winners, the average wait between the first Slam title and the second has been six Slam events.

Even Roger Federer, winner of 17 Slam titles to date, had to wait for two tournaments between his first Slam win at Wimbledon in 2003 and his second at the Australian Open of 2004.

Pete Sampras, with 14 Slams in his career, had to wait 11 Slams between his first at the US Open of 1990 and his second, at Wimbledon in 1993.

Bjorn Borg waited four tournaments between his first and second Slam, the same as Rafa Nadal. Novak Djokovic waited 12 Slams.

The longest wait for a second Slam was by Marat Safin after his 2000 US Open win; it was 17 Slams later at the 2005 Australian Open that he lifted another.

The first graphic shows all the Open era multi-Slam winners and their waits between their first and second Slams:

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The list of one-Slam wonders in the Open era below contains names as illustrious as Andy Roddick and Goran Ivanisevic, whose near misses both included three Wimbledon runners-up spots as well as their sole Slam titles, respectively at the US Open and Wimbledon.

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Newcombe aside, the small brigade of multiple Slam winners who followed a first Slam win with a second in the next Slam – at any time in the history of four Slams a year since 1905 – achieved that feat between 1925 and 1956.

The first man to do it was Rene Lacoste by winning the French Open then Wimbledon in 1925.

Fred Perry was the next man to do it, winning the US Open in 1933 and then the Australian Open of 1934.

Famously, or infamously, Perry was the last British man before Murray to win a Slam singles title – in 1936.

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Tags: Andy Murray, Grand Slam, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Tennis
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Openly gay Olympians won six times as many golds as their peers. Why?

Thursday, August 23rd, 2012

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 cent), including the British equestrian rider Carl Hester, in the team dressage. Hester was the only openly gay athlete among the 451 men and women in Team GB.

By definition, 23 people is a small sample size, but the fact that it’s so small is part of the story. The success rates of those athletes puts the success rates of London Olympians overall in the shade.

Of the 10,820 athletes across all sports, Sportingintelligence has calculated that 595 separate individuals won a gold medal.

There were 302 gold medal events but in many of those events multiple people helped to win the gold, for example in all the team sports, in the non-solo rowing crews and in all the relay squads in athletics and swimming.

With 595 people going home with gold, that means one in 18 of London’s Olympians went home with gold (or 5.5 per cent).

Among the openly gay athletes – 20 of who were women and three were men – one in three went home with gold (or 30.43 per cent).

Openly gay Olympians in London therefore won six times as many gold medals per head as the total athletic population at the Games.

They also won more than twice as many medals per head of all colours than average. Around 1,800 individuals won medals of one colour or another (or 16.6 per cent of all athletes), whereas 43.4 per cent of the openly gay athletes won medals.

Are gay athletes better at sport? Almost certainly not, but we’ll come back to that shortly.

“It’s an absurdly low number,” said Jim Buzinski, the co-founder of Outsports, of the 23 openly gay Olympians. He was quoted in an Associated Press report carried by ESPN and the Huffington Post among others.

Estimates of the percentage of gay people vary widely but even at the low end of those estimates (1.5 per cent of people), one might expect around 160 gay athletes among the 10,820 participating at London 2012, or seven times as many as the 23 known to be gay.

Buzinski points out that considering the small ratio of openly gay sports people when set against, say, the ratio of openly gay people in the arts, politics or business, then “sports is still the final closet in society.”

What is staggering, statistically speaking, is the success of those 23 openly gay Olympians in London.

It is notable that the three men appeared in two sports – dressage and diving – that are anecdotally “gay friendly”. A spokeswoman for British Dressage, for example, said having gay riders “is the norm. Don’t get me wrong, there are straight riders too, but whether someone is gay or not in our sport is simply not an issue.”

In alphabetical order, the 23 openly gay London 2012 Olympians:

Marilyn Agliotti, Carlien Dirkse van den Heuvel, Kim Lammers and Maartje Paumen, all members of the Dutch women’s hockey team who won gold.
Judith Arndt, a German cyclist who won silver in London in the time trial.
Seimone Augustus, an American who won basketball gold.
Natalie Cook, an Australian beach volleyball player.
Lisa Dahlkvist, Jessica Landström and Hedvig Lindahl, all Swedish football players who reached the quarter-finals.
Imke Duplitzer, a German fencer who was part of a team coming fifth in the women’s team epee.
Edward Gal, a Dutchman who won bronze in the team dressage.
Jessica Harrison and Carole Péon, French triathletes who finished ninth and 29th respectively in London.
Carl Hester, a Briton who won dressage team gold.
Karen Hultzer, a South African archer.
Alexandra Lacrabére, a French handball player who reached the quarter-finals.
Matthew Mitcham, an Australian 10m platform diver who was the only openly gay male Olympian in Beijing, where he won gold. In London he reached the semi-final.
Mayssa Pessoa, a Brazilian handball player.
Megan Rapinoe, an American who won football gold.
Lisa Raymond, American tennis player who won bronze in the mixed doubles.
Rikke Skov, a Danish handball player.
Ina-Yoko Teutenberg, a German cyclist who missed bronze in the road race by 0.25seconds.

A person’s sexuality is, of course, of no relevance in terms of how they do their job, or live their life. Or rather it shouldn’t be.

Yet while being openly gay in many areas of public life (be it politics, the police, the arts, the clergy, banking, whatever) in many countries is no issue, gay people – at least openly gay – remain hugely under-represented in many professional sports, and that’s even in ‘liberal’ countries across Europe and North America.

Whether you think this matters or not possibly depends on whether you think there is a wider social significance of societies being open and free. In large parts of the world, same-sex sexual activity is an offence punishable by years in prison, and in seven countries the death penalty remains in force for active homosexuality. See country by country laws for details.

In sport, particularly in football, openly gay professional players are rare. In British football they are non-existent in the men’s game since Justin Fashanu.

The Football Association’s only openly gay councillor, Peter Clayton, has said gay players have been told to stay in the closet or risk damaging their clubs’ commercial interests. Publicist Max Clifford has admitted that he has advised gay Premier League clients to keep their sexuality secret.

Evidently this is one area where sport, particularly football, needs to evolve.

One of a very small number of experts who have studied and researched sexuality in sport in any detail is Professor Eric Anderson, an American who is a professor of sports studies at the University of Winchester in England. In his work as a sociologist he has studied why gay men and women pursue professional sport (or not) and cites a large-scale study of tens of thousands of college students in the USA that found “gay men are more likely [than straight men] to drop out of competitive sport, and follow other pursuits instead.”

Those that don’t drop out, Anderson says, often find themselves in an environment that does not encourage them to come out. “Cultural homophobia is dropping at a rapid rate, so this isn’t an issue with the fans,” he says, citing a study of British football supporters where 93 per cent (of 3,500 surveyed) said they would have no problem with a player coming out.

Neither, he says, is a player being gay an issue with team-mates, although gay players might fear coming out because a coach or manager, who will often holds a player’s career in their hands, may react adversely.

Rather, Anderson contests, it is the “gate keepers” of sport, or “alpha males” who hold key roles in governing bodies and commercial entities around sport, that create an atmosphere not conducive to coming out. “Homophobic men like Sepp Blatter,” he says, a reference to Blatter’s infamous statement that gay fans daunted at going to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar (where homosexuality is illegal) might refrain from sex while there.

As to why the openly gay Olympians won proportionately so many medals, Anderson is in no doubt that “openly” is the operative word, and that many times as many gay athletes took part, quite possibly winning no more or less than the overall London 2012 population.

His reseach has also shown, he says, that “gay male athletes are more likely to come out of the closet when they are good” and that “they have the sporting capital to negate the problems they encounter.”

Or in other words, a gay sportsman is much more likely be open about it when they know they’re got a great chance of winning – leaving little room for questions – from homophobes - over whether they should be involved in the first place.

So 10 medals, seven of them gold, among 23 gay Olympians in 2012 isn’t so anomalous – or rather it wouldn’t seem so if only one could see the whole picture.

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London 2012: Better for Great Britain than 1908 despite fewer gold medals

Monday, August 13th, 2012

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 Britain provided a third of those by herself.

So one might reasonably have expected Britain to win a lot of the 110 gold medals on offer, on home turf and in home water, in events as varied as tug of war and motorboat racing.

Britain did indeed win lots of golds, 56 of them, or just more than half on offer. So that’s 51 per cent of golds with 34 per cent of the athletes, so Britain did 151 per cent as well as she should have done.

Here’s another way of thinking about it. If the 110 medals had been split fairly between all the 2,008 competitors, then each nation should have won 5.48 golds for each 100 athletes. Which means Britain, with 676 athletes, should have won 37 gold medals. Instead GB won 51 medals – again, that’s 151 per cent of what would be expected.

At London 2012, when the size of the competition is factored in, Great Britain thrashed that performance by doing 192 per cent as well as should be expected.

Sportingintelligence has analysed the host nations’ performances at all 27 Summer Games to date.

We consider:

1: the number of golds on offer.

2: the amount of athletes at the Games from all nations.

3: how many golds each nation should have won per 100 athletes if divided equally. Golds available per athlete have got harder and harder to win. There were 18 golds per 100 people in Athens in 1896 and now that figure is fewer than three golds per 100 competitiors.

4: how many competitors the host nation had, and how many golds they won.

5: the percentage performance rating.

The graphic below – click to enlarge – includes every host at every Games since the first modern Olympic in Greece in 1896 and allows us to see at a glance how times have changed.

The key columns are the amount of golds the host should expect (given the size of their teams) against the amount they got, and the ratio.

(Article continues below)

Great Britain’s performance at London 2012 rates as the sixth best host nation performance at any Summer Games by these measures (see blue column on the right-hand side above for rankings 1-27 of the 27 Games).

The five better performers were the USA (1984), Soviet Union (1980), Germany (1936), China (2008) and the USA (1996) and the first four of those can arguably be seen as political and / or propaganda Games, where huge tallies for the host were influenced by one or more of boycotts, state backing for political reasons or other interference.

At the other end of the scale, Canada in 1976 remain the only hosts never to win a gold medal at their own Games, while London in 1948 saw Britain perform 23 per cent as well as she should have done if the medals had been dished out fairly.

There is a twist in this tale of Britain at the Games, however.

London 2012 was much better than the first-glance glory of 1908 but has not been Britain’s most successful Games to date, relatively. That was in 2008, when GB performed 221 per cent as well as expected.

This was because Team GB had ‘only’ 311 competitors in Beijing, against the army of 541 in London, an increase of 230 in four years.

The graphic below shows how Britain has performed in the 27 Games to date, ranking those performances.

Only eight times has Britain done as well as should be expected, and 19 times has failed to hit 100 per cent of a ‘fair share’ gold.

It is no accident that the last four Games, since Sydney in 2000, all fall within Britain’s six best Games by relative performance.

Money talks, and Lottery cash investment in British sport came on line ahead of Sydney 2000.

Home advantage – a well documented effect of hosting a Games – also helped to boost Britain this past fortnight.

. .

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As Kaka hits 10m followers: the world’s 20 most popular sportsmen on Twitter

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

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 or hate it, Twitter has soared into the media mainstream in the past year and is routinely used by millions of people as a primary source of breaking news, as well as a platform for promotion.

Sportingintelligence has compiled a list of the world’s 20 most followed sportsmen on Twitter (and they are all men aside from the athlete in 20th place, Serena Williams). See graphic below for details.

Eleven of the top 20 are footballers, which is indicative of what most people already know – that the beautiful game is the world’s most popular sport.

Basketball players (5) are next best represented, which is apt given that basketball is football’s closest challenger in team sports, primarily thanks to the NBA.

One cyclist, one NFL star, one boxer and Serena Williams make up the 20.

Six of the 11 footballers are from two clubs in Spain: Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo in the No1 and No2 slots are from Real Madrid, while four others are from Barcelona.

Manchester United contribute two players, Wayne Rooney in sixth place and Rio Ferdinand at No19.

Globally iconic figures of sport who are bubbling under this list with between 2m and 2.5m followers include Sachin Tendulkar, Tiger Woods and Mike Tyson, while Uruguayan footballer Diego Forlan is among those just outside the top 20.

As with all social media, things can change extremely rapidly.

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EXCLUSIVE: Djokovic, Nadal, Federer – as close to perfection as tennis has ever been

Monday, February 13th, 2012

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 the Open era since 1968.

A simple Grand Slam title count indicates the current era is special: Federer, Nadal and Djokovic have won 27 of the last 28 Slam singles titles between them.

But in order to obtain an objective idea of how this era compares with others, every Slam player of the past 54 years has been assessed and assigned a rating to show his ‘quality’ at any point in time.

The precise methodology, explained below, is based on a rolling period like the tennis rankings but focuses solely on the most important tournaments: the Slams.

The research found that at the completion of the 2012 Australian Open, where Djokovic beat Nadal in the longest final in Slam history, and Federer was a losing semi-finalist, the combined ‘quality’ of the three men had reached an all-time peak for the sport of any three players at one time, or 3,000 ‘rating points’.

This tally, with Nadal currently on 1,192 points, Federer on 1,008 and the upcoming Djokovic on 800, means the trio are collectively 83.71 per cent as perfect as they can possibly be at the moment.

Perfection be would that the three of them have won every Slam in the past four years between them (of 16), filled all the runners-up spots between them (of 16) and also filled one of the semi-final berths at each of those 16 Slams. In fact they have won 15 of the last 16 Slams, filled nine of the 16 runners-up berths, and had a further 11 semi-final appearances between them.

It might not be of much comfort to Britain’s Andy Murray to know he is competing in the greatest era men’s tennis has known but the analysis shows unequivocally how dominant the current ‘big three’ have been.

The research found that the next most high-quality era of the game peaked at the Australian Open of 1990, when winner Ivan Lendl, runner-up Stefan Edberg and semi-finalist Mats Wilander had a combined rating of 2,416 points or 67.41 per cent of perfect.

Prior to that, the next best was the Borg-Connors-McEnroe era, peaking at the US Open final of 1981 when the trio had a combined rating of 2,264 points, or 63.17 per cent of perfect.

The rolling career rankings of the top three and how they have pursued perfection are in the graphic here.

(Article continues below the graphics with best individual streaks, and best-quality rivalries)

Methodology

1: Sportingintelligence looked at every Grand Slam singles tournament since 1968, awarding 128 points to the winner (in a 128-man draw), 64 points to the runner-up, 32 to the semi-finalists, 16 to the quarter-finalists and eight points to those reaching the fourth round (or, typically, the second week, which is what marks the Slams out from all other events). No points were awarded before the fourth round, nor would they make any substantive difference to the results.

2: We elected to use a four-year period to measure each player’s rolling ‘quality’ as: a) It seemed a reasonable time over which a player has his ‘peak’ years. b) We modeled data over three years and five years and came up with broadly similar results anyway. c) The most Slams any man has won is 16, and the shortest time in which these could have been won, given ‘perfection’, is four years.

3: On a rolling basis, every player at any point in time is assigned a ‘quality’ rating. This could be a maximum of 2,048 for a single player, or 16 x 128 points for winning 16 straight Slams. In fact, Roger Federer’s best ever peak was 1,632 points, after the 2009 French Open and 2009 Wimbledon. See below.

4: The most perfect two-man ‘rivalry’ possible would be 3,072 points, or two players sharing the titles and runners-up slots at 16 consecutive Slams. In fact the best rivalry peak to date was Federer and Nadal’s combined tally of 2,536 points after the 2009 Australian Open.

5: The best three-man points tally possible is 3,584 at any given point in time. Djokovic, Nadal and Federer currently have 3,000 points, the highest ever.

Roger Federer is the player who has come closest to perfect in Grand Slam tennis, according to the research, as the graphic below shows.

Rafa Nadal, currently, has the second-highest quality rating aside from Federer, while three other players – Borg, Lendl and Sampras – remarkably all shared ‘peak’ totals of 1,176 points during their respective best four years in their careers.

The 10 highest-quality rivalries in men’s tennis (Open Era), peaked as follows.

NB: These peaks represent the combined ratings tallies of the two at the time of the peak

1 Nadal and Federer Peaked at Australian Open final 2009, with 2,536 points combined.

2 Djokovic and Nadal Peaked at Australian Open final 2012, with 1,992 points combined.

3 Lendl and Wilander Peaked at US Open final 1988, with 1,832 points combined.

4 McEnroe and Borg Peaked at US Open final 1981, with 1,800 points combined.

5 Lendl and Edberg Peaked at Australian Open final 1990, with 1,782 points combined.

6= Sampras and Agassi Peaked at US Open final 1995, with 1,584 points combined.

6= Becker and Lendl Peaked at Australian Open final 1991, with 1,584 points combined.

8= Connors and Borg Peaked at US Open final 1978, with 1,496 points combined.

8= McEnroe and Connors Peaked at Wimbledon final 1984 finals, 1,496 points combined.

10 Lendl and McEnroe Peaked at US Open 1985 final, 1,432 points combined.

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Serena Williams tops ‘bad girls’ fines list as secret sanctions revealed

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

By Sportingintelligence

23 January 2012

SERENA Williams, eliminated from the Australian Open on Monday after losing her fourth-round match against Ekaterina Makarova in straight sets, has today been revealed at the most heavily fined player in women’s tennis.

The 30-year-old American, who has won 13 Grand Slam singles titles (five Australian Opens, one French Open, four Wimbledons and three US Opens) has been fined $104,500 for eight separate behaviour violations on court at Slams since 2008 according to official International Tennis Federation figures provided to TheTennisSpace, which carries full details today.

Williams’ fines are more than double the total handed out to the next nine most-fined women on the circuit combined, as TheTennisSpace details in its article here. Full details of fines are not generally made public.

Infamously at the 2009 US Open, Serena told a line judge: “I swear to God, I’m f—— going to take this f—— ball and shove it down your f——throat, you hear that? I swear to God.”

For that she was initially fined $10,000, which was supplemented by another $85,000 for it being deemed a major offence.

The other seven violations in recent times:

2011 US Open Fined $2,000 for verbal outburst at umpire including: ‘You’re totally out of control, you’re a hater and you’re just unattractive inside.’

2010 Wimbedon Fined $4000 for skipping a press conference.

2009 US Open Fined $500 for racket abuse.

2009 Australian Open Fined $1000 for an audible obscenity.

2008 Wimbedon Fined $500 for swearing.

2008 Australian Open Fined $1000 for swearing, $500 for racket abuse.

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Tennis players underpaid? Why Djokovic beats Barca and Kvitova is Manchester United

Monday, January 9th, 2012

By Nick Harris

SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year

9 January 2012

The most lucrative Grand Slam in tennis history is nigh, with the Australian Open singles winners due to collect Aus$2.3m each (£1.49m), which is more than any Slam singles winners to date.

For triumphing in the doubles, the winning couples will split Aus$454,500 (£296,000), also a record. The mixed doubles winners will split Aus$135,000 (£88,000).

To put that in context, each half of the winning mixed pair will earn more from that one tournament than the average Australian does in a year. Plus expenses for local travel, accommodation and food.

The singles winners – Federer or Djokovic or Murray or whoever, and Serena Williams or Kvitova or Clijsters or whoever – will make about 40 years’ pay for a ordinary person. Plus expenses.

And yet it is inevitable that at some stage this year a debate will rage within the sport over whether tennis players are underpaid.

Are they?

Given that it’s easy to make quick, emphatic cases for “Yes, of course they’re underpaid” and “Not at all underpaid”, I’d have to conclude they’re pretty much paid about the right amount.

Certainly it’s tough to make a case that the very best tennis players are underpaid when the on-court-earnings alone of the top tennis stars soar above the average first-team earnings at the best-paid clubs in global sport.

And as the graphic below stresses, for most top-100 tennis players, their on-court earnings are a minority of their income, whereas for most players of team sports, their club salaries are a majority of their income.

Novak Djokovic made $12.6m in 2011 in on-court winnings, which dwarfs the most recent figure of $7.9m first-team average pay at Barcelona, the world’s best-paid sports team by average pay. (For more on the Global Sports Salaries Survey, click here).

Similarly, the world’s No1 on-court earner in the women’s game in 2011 was Petra Kvitova, whose $5.15m put her just ahead of the average first-team pay at Manchester United, who came in at No16 in the world’s best-paid teams in the 2011 GSSS.

WHICH TENNIS STAR IS WHICH TEAM?

The graphic is self explanatory and shows how Serena Williams is comparable to the Nashville Predators and how Andreas Seppi is like the New York Red Bulls and how the 100th best-paid on-court women’s tennis player of 2011 is like Hibernian of the SPL.

(Article continues below).

We can argue, however, that tennis players are underpaid because typically the total prize funds at Grand Slams (the biggest, richest and most profitable events) are around 12 to 13 per cent of those tournaments’ income.

Let’s consider Wimbledon 2011, where the total prize fund (including per diem expenses) was £14.6m. Prizes ranged from £1.1m for the singles winners down to £11,500 for first-round singles losers, and as much as £1,750 for losers in the first round of qualifying.

Exact Wimbledon income is not publicly declared but I estimate it was around £120m, with c.£25m of that from ticket sales, c.£35m from suppliers and sponsors, and c.£60m from broadcasting companies. That means the £14.6m prize fund falls between the 12 and 13 per cent of income, and it is similar across the Slams.

Compared to some of the world’s other major sports, a 12-13 per cent cut of income for the players might be considered derisory.

Within English Premier League football, first-team players collectively typically take home about 50 per cent of a clubs’ total income, although in some cases it’s often a much higher percentage than that.

In NFL American football, the players take a 48 per cent split of revenues. In NBA basketball, the players used to take 57 percent but following a pay dispute that led to the cancellation of the first part of the 2011-12 season, that’s down to 51 per cent – or around four times what tennis players get at Slams.

Wimbledon could certainly afford – in theory – to pay the players more. The summer’s big English tournament typically makes a ‘surplus’ (profit) of around £30m, or around twice the prize fund. So theoretically prize money at Wimbledon could be trebled across the board and the event would still be in the black.

But that doesn’t happen and won’t happen. That ‘surplus’ goes into tennis development. And it isn’t guaranteed in any case; it won’t necessarily persist. And frankly, why pay players even more than the big sums on offer when nobody is staying away for financial reasons? It would make no sense.

Most tournaments, of course, don’t make anything like the profits that the Slams can make. Many events at less glamourous levels actually run at a loss, subsidised by national or regional associations or other benefactors. Even modest prize money could be argued to be too high to be sustainable at such events.

This is where it starts to become easier to argue that, in fact, tennis players are not underpaid at all.

In team sports, a club will – generally speaking – have a fairly fixed income over a season from ticket sales, commercial revenues and television money, and its single biggest expense will be player salaries, and most clubs know they’ll have a stable audience level.

But in individual sports, certainly at sub-Major level in the two most global ‘solo’ sports of tennis and golf, tournament organisers must should all kinds of costs and risks to stage an event while lacking certainty of income. Often a stellar name or two can make all the difference to ticket sales, sponsorship, media interest – and hence income.

And what’s the best way to guarantee a big name? Pay a big, fat appearance fee, a common but largely unspoken source of significant secondary income for tennis players after prize money. Rafael Nadal will skip the Wimbledon warm-up at Queen’s in 2012 for an appearance fee in Halle, Germany, reportedly worth £750,000. That’s about seven times as much as Philipp Kohlschreiber picked up for winning at Halle in 2011! Large six-figure appearance fees are not unusual for the leading names.

In fact for many tennis players, certainly inside the top 100, prize money will routinely be a minority part of total income. Appearance money, racket and kit endorsements and other off-court commercial sponsorships can dwarf on-court earnings.

Maria Sharapova made $2.9m (£1.88m) in on-court winnings in 2011 – of an estimated total of $25m (£16.2m) in total, most of which was commercial income.

Five women made more on the court: from Kvitova’s $5.1m, via Wozniacki, Azarenka, Na Li to Stosur’s $3.5m, and each will have made millions more from other sources.

If we assume the world’s tennis fans have an appetite for around 100 top players of each sex at any one time (enough to fill a Slam singles draw, leaving room for absences and wild cards), then I don’t think the No100 ranked players in the world can argue they’re doing too badly for cash.

In 2011, the men’s 100th best male on-court earner was Simone Bolelli of Italy ($299,021 before appearance money, kit deals, endorsements and any personal sponsorship) and the world’s 100th best female earner was Laura Pous-Tio of Spain ($206,222).

A version of this article was produced for publication today on a new tennis website, TheTennisSpace.

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Revealed: The tennis ‘grunting manual’ that warns of ‘unfair, unethical tactic’

Thursday, January 5th, 2012

By Sportingintelligence

5 January 2012

A tennis coaching document used at one of the world’s most famous tennis academies – Nick Bollettieri’s in Florida – recommends breathing out when hitting the ball in a manner that naturally leads to punctuation with a grunt, it has been revealed today.

While the academy and Bollettieri – who is an occasional columnist for Sportingintelligence – have always denied teaching grunting, and are actively working to eradicate it, it appears the noise is one by-product of particular ‘ideal’ breathing patterns taught during play.

The document has been obtained by a new tennis website, The Tennis Space, which has launched today, and a special report on that website is linked here.

The document, ‘Breathing vs Grunting in Tennis’, was written by Dr Angus Mugford, the director of the academy’s Mental Conditioning Division. The aim for players “is to manage optimal breathing on the breathing continuum”, which essentially entails breathing in until the moment contact, and then forcefully out when the ball leaves the strings.

To use grunting as a tactic to disrupt opponents is described in the document as ‘unfair’, ‘unethical’ and ‘unsportsmanlike’.

Bollettieri himself, one of the most successful coaches of all time who has worked with 10 world No1 players, has said: ”We’ve been doing research with our trainers and doctors about how to relax the body without grunting – we don’t want them to stop breathing, because they still have to release the tension”.

Nick Bollettieri pledges to help tackle grunting issue in tennis

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

By Alexandra Willis

27 October 2011

Nick Bollettieri has offered his support to the Women’s Tennis Association in their battle to contain the presence of grunting on the tennis tour, revealing that he and his team are already exploring the ways to teach young juniors not to grunt.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Bollettieri, also a contributing columnist to this website, said that he believed working with juniors to find ways to help them not to grunt was the correct approach.

“You have to go down to the youngsters, the 10 and unders. That’s the time to make an impact. Because it is a hell of a noise.

“We’ve been doing research with our trainers and doctors about how to relax the body without grunting,” he said. “We don’t want them to stop breathing, because they still need to release the air to release the tension. But we are making a bigger push to get them to release the energy in a proactive way.”

Stacey Allaster, chief executive and chairman of the WTA, this week revealed that the WTA plans to send representatives to the Bollettieri Academy during the offseason to discuss the grunting problem with juniors and coaches.

“Stacey is a good friend and I really want to support her,” Bollettieri said. “I think it’s a damn good idea.”

Bollettieri’s comments came after Sam Stosur’s coach David Taylor spoke to Australian journalists about the grunting problem. “It is silly screaming,” Taylor said. “It is after contact & it is in times when the matches are close.”

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REVEALED: Royal Wedding TV audience closer to 300m than 2bn (because sport, not royalty, reigns)

Sunday, May 8th, 2011

By Nick Harris

SJA Internet Sports Writer of the Year

9 May 2011

Fanciful predictions said two billion people would watch the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton live on TV around the world – and around 300m actually did, according to preliminary findings of research by sportingintelligence into the real global audience.

That figure is an extrapolation from figures in 11 major countries that account for almost half the world’s population: China, India, the USA, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Canada and Australia.

Those countries are all in the top 50 by population, and include the three most populous. The total wedding audience for that half share of the world was 161.92m people. See the table at the bottom of this piece for a more detailed breakdown.

We have also looked at data from a selection of other countries, including Brazil and Japan, but have yet to establish viewers there in terms of actual numbers of people (as opposed to a ratings figure, which tells us only a percentage share of an audience at a time of day, but not how many people overall, yet). Early findings in those countries are consistent with a global 300m audience.

Viewing figures are routinely exaggerated before events. Made-up numbers erroneously go down in history as fact. This often happens in the sporting world, as this website mused ahead of the nuptials of William – who is the president of the English FA, and a defender of the Aston Villa faith – and Kate.

So in an attempt to find the real numbers – and show why sport, not royalty, reigns in any given territory – sportingintelligence considered the official TV figures for the wedding from the UK and 10 other countries of varying size, politics, wealth and geography from Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australasia. (Africa, the forsaken continent, has one billion people but even in the richest countries only one in three people have access to TV at home, and in the poorest African countries fewer than one per cent have TV. Data in most African countries is less reliable diary data in any case).

Extrapolated to the whole world, the 162m from our 11 ‘sample’ countries would make a total audience of around 340m people but 340m is almost certainly too high because our 11 countries contain key nations where interest is especially high, including the UK (where a massive 42 per cent of the population watched), the USA, Canada and Australia.

A number of countries – including Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and North Korea among others – had no live coverage on any state or other domestic channel, and while it is possible people in those countries could take feeds from other places, the audiences would have been so low as to be almost insignificant.

The percentage data we have from nations like Brazil and Japan can be included in our findings when confirmed as numbers of people. (And anyone with reliable data for nations not mentioned, please feel free to email it to us at submissions@sportingintelligence.com).

Provisionally it appears that around 1.2m Brazilian urban households watched live on TV, but whether that translates to 2m or 5m viewers (or anywhere in between, in a country of 191m people) is not yet certain. It will be a decent share of a small 6am audience.

Similarly, we know that the wedding had a 23 per cent audience share of Japanese viewers at the relevant evening local time on NHK, but without knowing the number of people watching TV, we don’t want to count numbers that are guesses. If a third of Japan (population 128m) was watching on 29 April, and 23 per cent of those were watching the wedding, that would be 9.75m people, or almost eight per cent of Japan, a very decent figure. But we don’t know, yet.

To put the popularity of the wedding in context, a greater share of the audience in Japan at the same time (almost 30 per cent) was watching coverage of the figure skating world championships in Moscow.

As a general rule, only major global sports events – namely Olympic ceremonies and football World Cup finals – will get anywhere close to 1bn viewers, let alone 2bn, as discussed here.

And in any given territory, records will be set (and are held) mostly by major sporting events, which will always be of local interest either because teams from that nation are involved, or that nation is a host.

Britain’s most watched TV event of any genre in history was the 1966 World Cup final, with 32.2m viewers, beating this year’s wedding by more than six million. A number of other football matches have had better ratings in Britain than the wedding.

The American TV audience for Wills ‘n’ Kate was 22.8m, a whopping figure for the time of day, but a small number compared to the 111m people in the USA who watched this year’s Super Bowl live on TV in its entirety.

In India, 42.1m people tuned in to the wedding, which in gross terms made it the biggest single wedding audience by country. But that equates to only 3.48 per cent of India’s population of 1.2bn people. And the cricket World Cup final this year attracted 25m more people than the wedding.

In China, the wedding rights were bought by the Shanghai Media Group, and while it was available across the country, in many areas it was via pay-TV, which always limits the audience. Local sources say a maximum of 30m watched live in China (2.24 per cent of the population), although this may be slightly high. China’s highest ever TV confirmed audience was 500m (ish) watching on state TV, CCTV, from a global 1bn audience who tuned in to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

In Canada, a very respectable 5.2m of 34m people watched the wedding (15.29 per cent of the population) but this pales besides the 16.6m (half the country) who watched Canada win the Olympic ice hockey gold medal last year in Vancouver.

Some of Britain’s European neighbours posted decent wedding figures (see table) but nothing compared to their sporting highs. In Germany, for example, the wedding figure of 4.48m people is small compared to the 30m who watched Germany play Italy in the semi-finals live on domestic TV during the 2006 World Cup.

One surprise in our research was the massive wedding audience, relatively, in the supposedly anti-monarchy enclave of sports-mad Australia. The biggest reported TV audiences in Australian history were for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, with more than 6m people, albeit before the introduction of the most accurate meter monitoring in 2001.

Since that date, the most-watched programmes on Aussie TV have been the Australian Open tennis final of 2005 (Hewitt v Safin, 4.04m people) followed by the rugby union World Cup final of 2003 (Australia v England, 4.01m).

The wedding beat them both Down Under, with 4.34m. Call yourselves sports fans, cobbers? Seems like you’d rather have a Royal love story to us . . .

For those interested in further reading on selected audiences, follow links to stories about wedding ratings in the UK, in the USA, in Canada, in Australia, in France, in Spain, in Germany, in Italy, in New Zealand, in Argentina, in India, in Brazil and in Japan.

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