Why I hate Wimbledon

Largely, I hate the players. I can't help it, I've always had a strong sense of of moral fairness, and inherent dislike of privilege, which dooms me to not get on well with Wimbledon. Say what you like about footballers (and I do, bunch of egotistical, over-paid, would-be rapists), at least a fair number of them just started playing at school and went from there. Tennis players are literally bred for purpose. I haven't heard of any of them gestating in a lab yet, but we can't be far off. Look at Murray - he's the product of his mother's junior tennis player factory. Was reading about another female player the other day, who'd been playing since she was three - normal children do not just pick up a tennis racket and start playing of their own accord at age three. The children who do that, and end up playing professionally at Wimbledon 10-12 years later are the ones who have wealthy, upper-middle class, incredibly pushy parents who decided that little Cedric or Cedrina was going to make them even richer than they already were when they were still just a dollar sign in their father's eye. For my tastes, if someone is going to get very, very rich for doing comparatively little, they should at least have not come from an extremely privileged background to start with.

Plus, Wimbledon brings out the worst in the press. I know this is not the players faults' but I'm taking it out on them anyway. Every year the same thing - the more attractive female players (although that's a suspiciously high number of them, again, bred for purpose) are on the cover of FHM in their scanties - not that they wear much more on court - promoting the idea that no matter how intelligent or talented you are, it's still your body that's your most important asset. Actually, that is their fault.

What's not their fault, but is equally, if not more abhorrent is the tabloids publishing endless photos of female players that just "happen" to have been taken when they were jumping and their skirts have blown up. The film crews continually zoom in on the blondes in low cut dresses in the crowd shots.

All of which leads to the tiresome debate the blows up every year around the Williams sisters, in which people will mutter about them "dominating" women's tennis, whilst making it quite clear that their actual problem is that they have deemed them insufficiently attractive (and for a large portion of that, read insufficiently white) to be on tv. Completely forgetting that fact that sport is still nominally supposed to be about athletic prowess, not how many swimwear advertisements you can book. GAH.