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Children’s Sports as a Commercial Enterprise
More and more children in Russia are choosing tennis rather than a lawyer’s or doctor’s career as an opportunity to succeed. There are 13-years-old girls in Russia who are obsessed with tennis, Georges Goven, captain of the French women’s tennis team, said commenting on the results of the Federal Cup finals that Russia won hands down. He only forgot to mention that Russian girls do not always do this because they want to, but under strong pressure from their not entirely unselfish parents.
The tennis boom of the 1990s enabled Russia to become the world’s leader in women’s tennis, also showing that talented children could be good money-spinners. Not surprisingly, when first reports appeared in the media about the sort of money that 17-or 18-year old players were making, crowds of parents started besieging tennis school. Before long, tennis became by far the most popular sport in Moscow, leaving behind the “eternal leader” – soccer. And this is despite the fact than tennis schools charge pretty steep feels with the exception being made only for very gifted children. British filmmakers who shot a documentary about the phenomenon of Russian women’s tennis noted that Russian parents start taking their children to tennis courts at age five or six, compared to eight or 10 in the West.
Of course, in placing their offspring at tennis school, not all parents think about their careers. Still, there are plenty of those determined to derive financial benefit from their children’s athletic prowess. They are not even deterred by the fact that only a handful will reach the tennis pinnacles and million-dollar incomes. In a private conversation, the father of a young tennis player admitted that his daughter could not become an international star, but she was already making pretty good money as a sparring partner for some high-profile players or rich amateurs who hired her for training.
In numerous sociological surveys, parents say they do not take their children to sport schools to make them professional athletes. Still, the commercialization of sport is certainly a factor to be reckoned with. In the wake of the resounding success achieved by pole-vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva at the Athens Olympic Games, there were long lines of those wishing to take up this admittedly minor sport. No sooner had Tatyana Lebedeva won the world’s most prestigious IAAF Golden League series in the triple jump than parents rushed to entroll their children at the volgograd-based sport school Kaustik, where the champion had started her career.
Particular sports are known to have suddenly come into fashion. Thus, Irina Rodnina’s spectacular victories made figure skating extremely popular with parents, while the successes scored by the Soviet ice hockey players caused hockey school to spring up even in parts of the country where, due to the warm climate, the sport could only be practiced on artificial ice. In Georgia, in the wake of Nona Gaprindashvili’s victory at the world chess championship, parents saw it a point of honor to place their daughters in a chess school. As a result, the small republic had a galaxy of brilliant women chess players. Yet the parents’ striving to ensure prosperity through sports not only for their children but also for themselves is obviously a new trend.
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