I asked you a question that probably seems reasonable to you more than once: what is La Serena like? Why the Chile Davis Cup match - Russia, the match is in some ways historical, since Soviet sports teams didn’t go to Chile for some reason, but somehow the Russians didn’t accept, it’s not the capital of the country, the six millionth Santiago, and the resort that is not adjacent to it Viña del Mar, known for its tennis tournament (in fact, the Open Championship of Chile), and located 500 km north of Santiago, an ocean town with a population of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants? In search of an answer, almost two tens of thousands of kilometers had to be overcome. He was prosaic.
The owner of the main team, as well as the national tennis trophy, went to the match of the first round of the new season in a weakened composition. At first, the Russian national team released the two leading players - US Open semi-finalists Nikolai Davydenko and Mikhail Yuzhny for regular season swimming. The calculation of the team captain Shamil Tarpishchev was reasonable: for tennis the matches for the Davis Cup are always a knockout factor, and we have a margin of performers, and besides, just different ones are suitable for playing on Chilean clay courts. However, the supply turned out to be fragile: Dmitry Tursunov and Yevgeny Korolev were injured at the Australian Open in Melbourne, and Tarpishchev only had one big card - the ace itself, to fight the formidable Chileans, led by Fernando Gonzalez, who had gained a crazy shape. Marat Safin is a great player, this is a fact. However, he assigns his trump suit himself - at will, or rather, according to his mood. And the ace of simple, as you know, beats any trump card, even six.
So, the road to La Serena was personally paved by Safin, our chief specialist in soil play Igor Andreev, whose significant minus was the lack of competitive practice after an injury; players of the second rating hundreds Igor Kunitsyn, Teimuraz Gabashvili and Yuri Schukin, as well as continuing to treat Tursunov's left hand, which Tarpishchev was not going to count on as a fighter at all. In this composition, the Russian team became an outsider of the match, which, of course, did not stop her from preparing for the weekend with a full calculation.
Players arrived in Chile on Sunday, almost a week before the match. The coaching staff led by Tarpishchev settled on the spot a few days earlier. We settled in a quarter-hour drive from La Serena's golf club - the only place in the area quiet, calm and respectable. In La Serena, the Russians choose to work out on the court of the stadium, where the match will be played on the weekend. The history and appearance of the stadium is a special conversation.
The golf club is quiet and calm. Of the attributes necessary to prepare for the match are several courts, a football field and, of course, a complete golf set. On the eve of tennis, tennis players played with rapture, won by Tursunov, who has a solid experience. True, there was no Andreev and Safin: the main characters of the upcoming match trained more than the rest and did not leave any strength on golf. But in football (and the Russians have already played two full matches here) Marat and Igor frantically chopped, while Tursunov did not go on the field: God forbid to aggravate the wrist injury. In addition, according to Tarpishchev, Tursunov plays European football as American, and there is no particular sense in his participation in football matches. How, alas, there is no sense in his participation in the main event of the week. To risk health - this was already with Tursunov a couple of years ago, when he made his way in the APR tour despite a back injury.
Well, now, finally, I will answer my own question. When the municipality of La Serena agreed with the Tennis Federation of Chile on holding a match solely for the purpose of tourist advertising the city (here it is, prose of the moment), it was all for a little: to build a stadium. I must say that in Viña del Mar, if anything, we would also have to take up construction, since the stands of the central court can accommodate 4 thousand spectators, and this is negligible for the match, which the whole country is looking forward to. So in La Serena it was even easier to solve the problem. They didn’t build on anything or design cunningly: they went out into the open field and gathered ten thousandth stands in a week like scaffolding. On the top row, admittedly, it's scary: it feels like blowing a breeze - and the structure will fly off into the Pacific Ocean. But, they say, the design was calculated. “Do not worry, señor,” says the worker, noting my bewilderment, “everything is reliable.” And for convincing demonstrates a four-inch nail. The rows of boxes, which will soon become steps, evoke sad thoughts, and I go down to the court to see how Marat Safin tortures himself and his personal trainer Alexander Volkov with training. The tortures consist not only in the fact that Safin works hard, setting a crazy rhythm for the occupation, but also in the communication of Marat with the outside world. He reacts to the training events almost as expansively as to the events of an unsuccessful match, once even breaks a racket, not forgetting what the light is worth blaming the Chileans for too soft coverage of the court. Gonzalez, whose style cannot be called unpaved, is such a sluggish court (and you can’t do a hard one in a week at all) either, but the Chileans say nothing about the coverage, counting on viscous tennis lover Nicolas Massa and, of course, on his own audience, which is not equal in the whole world.
Chileans, by the way, if they win this weekend, they will play the next match (with the winner of the France-Romania meeting), moreover, they will also accept their opponent in the semifinals, no matter who they are. So for the current season, South Americans are counting on especially. “Maybe one of the matches will be held on Easter Island?” - I jokingly ask the secretary of the Chilean Tennis Federation. “We thought,” he replies without blinking an eye. “But it’s very windy there.” Well, the island of stone idols does not need advertising. And for me, La Serena is still exotic. Some stands are worth what!
Alexander SHMURNOV, "Newspaper"