And here we go!

Just to clarify once again, though I love watching all kinds of tennis matches and players, my #1 is Roger Federer.  So even though I'm an American and maybe should be cheering for guys like John Isner or Andy Roddick to win medals, Roger is my guy and I want gold for him above anyone else.  Now that we got that straight, a short look at his draw.  While I was happy to see that David Ferrer would be his projected semifinal opponent rather than Andy Murray, and that Berdych, Tsonga and Raonic were all on the other side of the draw, I was a little distressed to see his first two rounds.  As most know by now, his first round opponent, Falla, was up two sets and a break on him two years ago at Wimbledon.  His potential second round opponent, Benneteau, was up two sets on him a few weeks ago.  In both cases, if it were the Olympics, he would have been out.   Obviously he is well aware of this and he knows he has to come out of the blocks strong.  Hopefully the fact that he just had great success on grass will carry over and get him through these first couple matches.  I feel like if he can win those, his chances for a medal, hopefully gold, are very strong.

The bottom half of the draw is quite challenging with all those big hitters I mentioned earlier.  No one has an easy ride to the finals, that's for sure.  Nothing is a sure thing even for the very strongest and highest ranked players, so it should be a very interesting week-and-a-half.  I'm curious to see how Novak Djokovic plays, as he certainly hasn't been the Djoker of 2011.  I'm sure he is anxious to remedy that.

And, sweet guy that he is, Roger has given his doubles partner Stan Wawrinka the opportunity to represent Switzerland by carrying the flag in the opening ceremony.  This also works out well for Fed given that his first match is tomorrow.  It's really too bad they choose to have the opening ceremony late at night, which prevents many of the tennis players from even attending.  Don't understand why they can't do it earlier.  But the reason they are there is to compete to their best ability athletically, not to go to a big ceremony, so Roger is making the right decision to skip the big event and be prepared for tomorrow.

Hopefully he and Stan can do well in doubles again this year too, but the focus, in my mind and I'm sure his too, is on getting a singles medal.  Go for the gold, Roger!