Sparkling Russian tennis stars hone their skills from a young age - it's one positive legacy from the old Soviet Union, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Moscow
Svyatoslav Mirza sits in the shade of a broad tree, soaking up the forehands, backhands, sobs and screams that herald the birth of new tennis talent in Russia.
After more than 30 years in coaching, little surprises him at a junior championship; not the tantrums and tearful exits, nor the flashes of raw talent that suddenly illuminate a player's path to future glory.
On these clay courts of the Spartak club in a leafy Moscow suburb, he helped hone the skills of the finest generation of Russian players to date, before sending them surging onto the world stage, and swarming into the upper echelons of the women's game.
While the erratic Marat Safin and promising Mikhail Yuzhny, who both occasionally still train at Spartak, lead a stuttering vanguard in men's tennis, there are now 10 Russians in the women's top 50, with six ranked 15th or higher.
At Wimbledon, a quarter of the 32 women's seeds are Russian, led at number two by the winner of last month's French Open, Anastasia Myskina.
"Nastya was always sharp, supple, and quick, but you couldn't tell quite how far she'd go," says Mirza this week, of a woman he coached for five years, until she was 20. Now 23, Myskina beat compatriot Yelena Dementieva in a one-sided final at Roland Garros, a match-up between Spartak graduates that had veteran trainers here wrapt.
"They were very different girls," recalls coach Yelena Nikishikhina of the two players, who practised and competed together as children. People said you could lock Dementieva in the practice hall and she'd just get on with what you'd told her to do. She was always good, always dedicated and hard-working. Myskina was different: she sees the court so well, but is sometimes up and sometimes down; she was superb in Paris, though."
Both coaches are watching their latest charges in the open championship at Spartak, a forest complex of courts and wooden cabins that still feels like an almost idyllic summer camp, despite the desperate squeals and grunts of young hopefuls and a reputation as a rigorous training camp for top-flight talent.
"The next Myskina and Dementieva could be here, and they could be even better than the current stars. The latest crop is superior, technically speaking, to the last," says Mirza.
"But unfortunately Russia is still without a system of finding the best talent, bringing it together and using the best trainers and facilities to develop it. In the Soviet days we used to go to schools looking for the best players, but not any more. Now it is up to parents and trainers to find funding for their child."
In a grindingly poor country stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, that means getting young players to Moscow fast and tapping into the massive wealth concentrated there in the hands of a relatively small number of businessmen.
"After the Soviet Union collapsed, people realised they would get little state help and that sport could perhaps be profitable," says Alexei Nikolayev of sports management firm SFX. "Parents started to push their kids through and many invested everything in their child's talent. It was like their last hope."
"But for someone outside Moscow with talent there can be huge problems, and it is very hard to build a career. Nine out of 10 promising players are probably lost in the provinces," says Nikolayev, who works with Vera Zvonareva, the world number 14 seed, and rising men's star Igor Andreyev. "We only see the results of those that come through, and they are pretty amazing - you can only imagine what we could do with a proper system."
Tennis experts concur that the emergence of Myskina, Dementieva and the rest, not to mention the woman who blazed the Russian trail, Anna Kournikova, springs from a Soviet system predicated on discipline and an almost ruthless drive to succeed.
"The roots of today's system are still in the Soviet one," says Konstantin Bogoroditsky, who spent 20 years coaching the Soviet and Russian women's tennis teams. "Unlike in the West, we make children specialise very quickly in sport. By 10 or 11, children already concentrate on just one sport, to try and make them into champions. And it is easier with the women than the men. The men's game is tougher, and the competition more fierce, and it takes them longer to come through, demanding more cash and more patience."
The capricious talents of Yevgeny Kafelnikov and Marat Safin, and now burgeoning success in the women's game, have released a flood of young Russians onto the nation's usually dilapidated courts. Some 4,000 under-16s competed on the Russian tour last year, and 127 towns and cities hosted more than 1,000 tournaments.
Though widely derided in the West for overrated and overexposed, Russians still credit Anna Kournikova with giving a huge boost to tennis here with her appearance in the 1997 Wimbledon semi-final, at the age of 16. Her mantle as tennis' most marketable asset has been reluctantly adopted by Maria Sharapova, a six-foot blonde who, at the age of 17, has shot to number 15 in the world with a series of fearless displays against established players.
Sick of being referred to as "the next Kournikova", she recently snapped: "I'm not the next anyone. I'm the first Maria Sharapova. If people want me to be a tennis babe, I'm sorry, I'm not going to be that." But she has already signed the kind of lucrative marketing and modelling deals that the tyros at Spartak's summer open - and their parents - desperately crave.
With their expensive sportswear and racquets, the young players look like mini versions of their professional heroes, and they affect attitudes to match. Ten year-olds whine and sometimes sob over unfavourable line calls and summon the umpire from his chair to inspect ball marks in the clay. Others bounce their outsize racquets in frustration, sit in surly silence alongside their opponents during breaks and urge themselves on in accented English.
"Come on!" one repeatedly screams, "Yes" another hisses upon winning points, while a third cries "Good girl!" in Russian after each successful first serve.
Egos aside, the talent - and the pressure - is unquestionable.
Mirza thinks his player, the lean 12-year-old Arina Mariyenko, could make the big time, and she soon reduces her battling semi-final opponent to tears with a mixture of grim determination and rasping ground strokes.
Nikishikhina believes blonde 10-year old Darya Gavrilova is set for success, and praised her aggressive play and attacking mentality in winning through to the final of her own age-group.
"She has that innate will to win and takes chances, goes for big shots. Competition is tough for some kids, while others thrive on it - it's about how they react to stress," Nikishikhina says. "It's tough for parents too, when you tell them their kid won't make it - most of them are living their dreams through their children."
Young players and coaches say they would love to see a Russian win Wimbledon, but their early showing has been disappointing. Sixth-seed Dementieva was quickly ousted along with Svetlana Kuznetsova, a quarter-finalist on her Wimbledon debut last year.
Number 20 seed Yelena Bovina and Dinara Safina retired with injury, and the latter's brother, men's number 19 seed Marat Safin, crashed out in ignominious fashion in the first round, all but giving up in a final tie-break and leaving SW19 saying he "hated" the place and might never be back.
Russian hopes now rest largely on Sharapova and Myskina, who went into the tournament buoyed by her Roland Garros win. She said she looked forward to taking on any of her rival countrywomen, and would fight fiercely for first place among Russia's new high-flying tennis heroes.
"It's an extra incentive - to show that you are not only Russia's top player by rank, but on the court. So I focus even harder on those games." But she would not begrudge a grand slam win for one of her compatriots, many of whom she faced as a child across the net at Spartak.
"Tennis is like a spiral," she said after her Paris triumph. "Today I'm the one, tomorrow it will be someone else."