Tennis Elite Get Back To Work After a Brief Off-Season 1
Rafael Nadal and the other tennis elite have hit the ground running in preparation for the 2010 Australian Open.
In case you missed it, December was technically the “off-season” for the elite of the tennis world.
It was the month when those sore, tired limbs and flagging hearts took a well-earned holiday.
The sun and sand of Florida, the coral islands of the Indian Ocean, and a paradise of Caribbean hideaways beckoned players and their partners before December rushed headlong into Christmas.
But downtime seems to be in short supply. As the rest of the world decks the halls, roasts the chestnuts on an open fire, and stuffs greetings cards into letter boxes, the tennis world is already winding up to the first tournaments of the ATP year in the very first week of 2010.
Whether the players launch their campaigns in the Middle East at Doha, in India at Chennai, or down under in Brisbane, all the courts will be hard and all the temperatures will be high, because all the focus is on the first Grand Slam of the year: the Australian Open.
The contenders want to hit the ground running, and that doesn’t mean turning up on New Year’s Day for a couple of days’ practice before the tournament gets underway. Indeed, it doesn’t even mean getting back into harness straight after Christmas. So intense is the competition, so demanding is the opening month, that most of them were pounding the Plexicushion well before December ended. Read the rest of this entry →
