Day One - A Great Day's Tennis

We had a great flight over on BA, only 10 minutes late coming in and with a marvellous view of an almost total lunar eclipse over Siberia. The moon turned an eerie blue colour! We then negotiated the airport all fairly quickly including a search of Dad's bag after a sniffer beagle (I kid you not) sensed something amiss - nothing more than a Kit Kat!! After a quick sprint through the hotel to check-in and pick-up tickets we heard that the Ladies Final had been added to today's order of play (what a bonus!) before the Mens tennis final, so the start had been brought forward by two hours. We had an exciting day of tennis to look forward to in the Lotus flower-shaped Centre Court.

Getting there was quite an adventure when the taxi took a series of wrong turns, through poor sign posting and ending up facing soldiers with large guns. Eventually we got to the Olympic Tennis Centre, to the north of the Olympic Green and about 8 miles from our hotel.

First up was the all Russian ladies singles final - Safina vs Dementieva, which was quite unremarkable at first, in front of a very small crowd due to the early start. The game then rose to a crescendo of grunts and great tennis. Dementieva won the game - 2 sets to 1 and took the gold on an all Russian podium.



Next was Nadal of Spain vs. Gonzalez of Chile and right from the off, this was a hard hitting cracker of a match. Gonzalez battled well but lost the first set 3-6. He then did much better in the second set going 6-5 up at one stage with a set point, but it was not to be. Nadal came back and won the resulting tie-break 7-6.

We're now pretty tired and after a beer and perhaps some Peking duck we're off to bed. Its Athletics tomorrow in the Birds Nest stadium - more then!