Serbs refuse to tread water

Getting to grips with your groundstrokes on a makeshift court in a disused swimming pool, or swapping sponsorship logos for winter warmers, is hardly the stuff of which tennis dreams are made.

However, Serbia’s startling success at this year’s French Open, when a country boasting little tennis tradition swept three of its players into the semi-finals, could yet serve to rewrite established western training techniques.

Novak Djokovic, Jelena Jankovic and Ana Ivanovic have defied convention to establish themselves inside their respective top 10s in the midst of one of the most unsettling periods in their nation’s history.

Ivanovic, who reached the Roland Garros final after humbling Maria Sharapova, revealed how her club made the best of things when a lack of heating ruled out her usual indoor training venue.

“They emptied the swimming pool, and they put carpet inside, and they placed two tennis courts, and that is where I grew up practising,” she said.

Jankovic endured even greater hardships on an indoor basketball court.

“In the winter time, when it goes to minus 15, it’s just the same temperature inside,” she said.

“So I was practising with my gloves, with my winter hat, with my jacket. That’s how we were playing there. Generally, in Serbia we don’t have good facilities, and that’s our problem.”

It may be the oldest cliche in the book: players from poorer nations in the old east reaping greater success because such spartan childhoods imbued within them a special hunger for succeed.

But the facts are startling. Six of the current top 10 on the Sony-Ericsson WTA Tour hail from the east.

Or consider the record of the nine American men in this year’s French Open first round: no victories, nine losses.

Jankovic added: “Serbians in general are a very, very strong people, with a strong winning mentality. I’m like that, for sure. I don’t like to lose and I never give up.”

But Djokovic has little time for deep analyses of Serbia’s sudden tennis prowess. He believes it is little more than the same kind of coincidence which yielded two world-beaters for Belgium in Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters.

“It’s really accidental that it happened in only one year that everyone came up together,” insisted Djokovic.

“It is a fantastic success, and what has happened is just phenomenal for such a small country.

“We had no tennis tradition. We didn’t have big players, especially in men’s tennis. And now tennis has got really popular in our country, and I think it is maybe the number one sport right now.”