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WIMBLEDON — The balance of power in world tennis will never be clearer than in onBelinda Bencic, born in the small Swiss town of Flawil, is the only one who will not be representing a Slavic country, and in fact her father’s family emigrated from Czechoslovakia in the 1960s.
The other five players gracing Centre have more recently Slavic claims: both Andrey Rublev and Alexander Bublik were born in Russia, Iga Swiatek and Hubert Hurkacz hail from Poland, and Novak Djokovic is perhaps the world’s most famous Serb. It is partly just a wrinkle of scheduling that all these players have ended up top of the bill on Sunday, although expect to see some ambassadorial faces in the Royal Box as a result, but it is also a reflection of tennis’s enduring success in the region where Slavic languages are spoken, which spans from the Balkan states all the way to Kazakhstan.
Slavs make up eight of the world’s top 20 players across the men’s and women’s game, and the depth is there too: the Czech Republic alone have 13 women ranked inside the top 200. In men’s tennis, there is greater representation from the Americas and Western Europe, but the likes of Russia, with four men in the top 50, ensure there is still a Slavic slant.
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