Competence Centrale

Agence France-Presse reports frequently on tennis, and its zeal to grab your attention produces results that range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

First, the ridiculous: The lead paragraph in the story the agency moved today on Daniela Hantuchova (she made it into the quarterfinals at Dubai) contained this gratuitous—and clumsy—reference (emphasis mine):

This allusion to her “problems’’ is somewhat ominous, and if anything, it serves to draw attention to—rather than divert it from—what could easily be construed as a less-than-central issue in the news of the day. In fact, if you weren’t familiar with Hantuchova, you might take that to mean that the Slovak lass had been paying a few too many visits to the McDonald’s drive-through window, à la Martina Navratilova, back in the day.

Of course, we know the opposite is true; Hantuchova was so thin at the nadir of her slump about 18 months ago that WTA tour officials were growing alarmed that they would be forced by the media to go through another bout of hand-wringing over “anorexic millionairesses.”

So we’re confused by the AFP’s odd choice of words, and wonder if they were being intentionally imprecise (what, if you must raise the issue, would be wrong with saying, “threatened by weight loss”?) or merely, well, stupid—something they’re pretty good at.

Still, if you’re a Hantuchova fan, you’ve got to be happy that with this third quarterfinal of the year she’s already surpassed her record of last year, and may well be on the way back.

As for the sublime, I’m going to let that example of AFP artistry wait until tomorrow. I’ll post it as the “Friday Feature,” an element I’d like to incorporate into TennisWorld as a regular feature. The subject is pretty loaded: the story AFP moved out of Dubai a few days ago, on equal prize money for women.