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 Photographer: Andrei Golovanov/Sergei Kivrin
Date: 10 Jul 2005 |  Photographer: Andrei Golovanov/Sergei Kivrin
Date: 10 Jul 2005 |  Photographer: Andrei Golovanov/Sergei Kivrin
Date: 10 Jul 2005 |  Photographer: Andrei Golovanov/Sergei Kivrin
Date: 08 Jul 2005 |  Photographer: Paul Zimmer
Date: 28 Nov 2004 |  Photographer: Andrei Golovanov/Sergei Kivrin
Date: 10 Jul 2005 |  Photographer: Andrei Golovanov/Sergei Kivrin
Date: 09 Jul 2005 |
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| 10 Jul 2007 - The Stadium at Topnotch, Stowe, Vermont, USA - Chris Bowers | |
| USA vs Russia - Clashes that had to stay under the political radar |
It seems odd that, in the 45-year history of the Fed Cup, the USA and Russia should be meeting for only the sixth time. And the first two meetings between the sides, which took place in 1979 and 1980, attest to a world where tense global politics were never far from the surface of tennis.
Until the end of 1991, Russia played as the Soviet Union, and on the three occasions a Soviet women’s team took on the US, Olga Morozova was involved. In 1979 and 80 she was the top Russian player, albeit by then a mother and in the twilight of her career, and in 1990 she was the Soviet captain.
For someone who was caught up in so much politics in her playing career, Morozova looks back on her two clashes against the Americans as remarkably non-political events. She made her Federation Cup debut in Paris at the height of the student uprisings of 1968 – “we were on the last flight allowed in and the first flight allowed out,” she recalls, “and I remember my eyes watering from the tear gas the police used to break up the demonstrations” – but says there was no political undercurrent when she played the Americans for the first time, despite the USA and USSR being enemies in the simmering Cold War.
“What I remember,” she says of the 1979 Federation Cup on the clay of Madrid, “was that I saw bullfighting and went into Prada for the first time!” The Soviet team came up against one of the strongest American line-ups, featuring Tracy Austin and the newly married Chris Evert Lloyd. But Russia had one of the most promising players of the time, Natasha Chmyreva. Still only 20, the gifted Muscovite had used her brash attacking game to beat Evert twice in World Team Tennis at the age of 18. But despite reaching 13th in the rankings, she was an unsettlingly unpredictable personality, and on her least favourite surface lost 60 61 to Austin. Morozova played a good match against Evert Lloyd, losing 64 86 as the US took an unassailable 2-0 lead (ties then were played over the best of three rubbers with several matches taking place in a week at a single venue).
In a poignant aside about 1979, Morozova added: “I spent most of my time socialising with the Americans, because I knew them from the tour, I had even played doubles with Chris a couple of years before. We had a young captain in Shamil Tarpischev, and as I was the senior member of the team, he gave me a lot of freedom to spend my social time as I wanted.”
The reason such a comment is poignant is that by the time the two nations played again in 1980, Chmyreva was no longer on the scene. Despite winning several indoor tournaments during the previous winter, she was banned from the USSR team. When asked why, she was told her socialising with “western” friends at the 1979 World Student Games in Mexico broke Soviet sports team rules, and she never played for her country again. Part of the reason for her ban was probably rooted in Chmyreva’s often-erratic behaviour, but her demise was also partly a side effect of the USSR’s travel restrictions that were themselves a spin-off from the Cold War.
In Chmyreva’s absence, the Russian team was considerably weakened, with Olga Zaitseva unable to fill the shoes of her erstwhile teammate. The quarterfinal in West Berlin had the potential to be politically charged, not just because the Berlin Wall ran very close to the Rot-Weiss club, which hosted the Federation Cup week, but also because the competition took place with the Moscow Olympics rapidly approaching, which both the USA and West Germany had promised to boycott. Ultimately the imbalance between the two teams was too strong for outside factors to be of any relevance. The Americans, again with Evert Lloyd and Austin, were strong favourites, and became even more so once Morozova strained a muscle in the USSR’s match against Italy two days earlier. Evert beat Zaitseva 60 62, and Austin crushed Morozova 60 61.
The USSR won its first rubber over the Americans in 1990 with a team from four of the Soviet Union’s nationalities. After the 14-year-old Jennifer Capriati had beaten the Georgian Leila Meshki, Natasha Zvereva from Belarus levelled the score with a three-sets win over today’s American captain Zina Garrison. But Zvereva had played every day that week in Atlanta, and the US doubles team of Garrison and Gigi Fernandez beat the Latvian Larisa Savchenko and the tired Zvereva 64 63.
By the time the two teams met again in the 1999 final, the Soviet Union had long since disappeared. Russia paraded one of its bright young stars, the 17-year-old Elena Dementieva – she beat Venus Williams in three sets, but only after the US had taken an unassailable 3-0 lead, thanks to wins by Williams and Lindsay Davenport.
Russia’s only win against the old enemy came in the semifinals two years ago. The US looked set to again parade Davenport and the freshly crowned Wimbledon champion Williams. But Davenport had picked up a back injury in her dramatic Wimbledon final against Venus a week earlier and pulled out, and Williams was one match too slow in making the transition from grass to indoor clay, falling to Anastasia Myskina in the opening rubber. The Russians ran out 4-1 winners and then beat France in a dramatic final at Roland Garros two months later.
With the nominated players for the forthcoming USA-Russia semifinal featuring 14 Grand Slam singles titles between them, the sixth clash of the world’s sole superpower and the leading power in women’s tennis looks set to be remembered for its quality tennis, with the overhanging presence of global politics now firmly banished to the past.
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