The Olympics only come every four years, and they have everything: precious metals, prestige, and national pride, along with extremely fit and horny women.
That’s good enough for most top players. 18 of the top 20 men are slated to participate, and nearly every player in the 64-man draw is ranked inside the top 100. This is a Masters-quality field, if not a touch better.
But aside from status and off-court perks, the competitors will not be rewarded accordingly. The ATP treats the Olympic singles event as less than a Masters tournament, giving the winner 750 ranking points and the runner-up 450. As Ben Rothenberg has pointed out, that means the silver medalist–probably one of the top four players in the world–will receive fewer points that week than the winner in Washington. Only one player in top 20 (Mardy Fish) is scheduled to compete in the US event.
More players should have made the sensible decision, skipping the Olympics in favor of Washington, perhaps adding Los Angeles or Kitzbuhel as well. Ranking points are as cheap at those events as they are expensive in London.
At a gut level, it’s unthinkable to skip the Olympics. All those intangibles count for a lot. If you’re a top-ten player, a few hundred extra ranking points wouldn’t make much of a difference, and an extra $50,000 in prize money barely registers. For mid-packers, though, “intangibles” sounds like a cynical euphemism for no money and a mediocre ranking boost.
Consider the case of Mardy Fish, the highest ranked player to opt for Washington over London. Based on a simulation of possible Olympic draws (see below for details), Fish could expect to net about 80 ranking points at the Olympics. The odds would favor him to win an opener, give him a decent shot at reaching the round of 16, and then turn against him. Two or three matches, no prize money, not much national pride.
In Washington, the story is much different. There, Fish is the runaway favorite. If he’s healthy (a big if), he has at least a 1 in 5 chance of winning the tournament. By my simulation, he can expect to gain 176 ranking points (with, of course, a decent chance of as many as 500), along with a cool $72,000.
An even more instructive example is that of Donald Young. Young is in the midst of a horrible losing streak, and he’ll head to London with a roughly 2 in 3 chance of heading home without a single victory. Expected ranking points: 24.
For Young, more is at stake than a few thousand dollars in prize money. He reached the semis in Washington last year, so he is defending 180 points this week. Losing all of those points will probably knock him out of the top 80. There’s a big difference between a ranking in the 50s and one in the 80s: The first gets you direct entry into almost every tournament; the second leaves you in qualifying (unseeded, sometimes!) for most Masters. Had Young elected to play Washington, he could have expected to defend at least half of his points. That wouldn’t just earn him about $30,000 for his week’s work, it would give him a ranking that would make it enormously easier for him to earn points and prize money for the next several months.
The American’s situation is unique in that he may be at a crossroads in his career. But the same reasoning applies to every player who doesn’t feel like he has a legitimate shot at a medal. The odds are against Radek Stepanek reaching the second round in London–he’ll lose almost all of the 500 points he’s defending from last year’s Washington title. Or Carlos Berlocq: It’d be hard to back the dirtballing counterpuncher at a grass-court challenger. He could’ve spent next week as a top-four seed on clay, at Kitzbuhel.
Maybe for Stepanek, Berlocq, or even Young, the experience will be worth it. But every scheduling decision made by a player–especially a veteran–has an impact on his prospects for months to come. Is the experience worth dropping down to qualifying at the next several Masters-level events? Would missing the experience be acceptable in exchange for getting a cheap ranking boost and earning a seed at the U.S. Open?
As much as it goes against our nationalist, media-driven instincts, Mardy Fish, Alexander Dolgopolov, and a very small number of other non-Olympians made the smart choice. As the first-round losers start to pile up next weekend in London, Washington will look like an excellent place to be.
After the jump, find a quick explanation of my tournament simulations, along with expected ranking points and prize money for top players in Washington and London.
To determine “expected ranking points” and “expected prize money,” I started with the current fields for both Washington and the Olympics. The 64-man field is set for London, with Feliciano Lopez replacing Rafael Nadal. Qualifiers and WCs are undetermined for Washington, so I used the first eight men on the alternates list instead. If anything, that overstates the quality of the Washington field, since a few more players will probably withdraw, and the wild cards are unlikely to be as strong as the first few alternates, who are all ranked in the top 130.
With those projected fields, I used this week’s rankings to determine seedings, and then randomly generated brackets for monte carlo simulations of the two events. Given each player’s chance of reaching each round, we can calculate a weighted average of each player’s points and prize money. For instance, Fish has a ~20% chance of winning Washington (500 points, $252,000), a ~30% chance of reaching the final (300 points, $114,000), and so on.
Listed below are all the players scheduled to be in action at one of the two events, ranked by expected ranking points. The players I used to stand in for qualifiers and wild cards in Washington are also included, even though many of them may not end up in the main draw.
Event Player p(W) ePts e$ OLY (2)Novak Djokovic (SRB) 24.8% 309 0 OLY (1)Roger Federer (SUI) 22.4% 293 0 OLY (3)Andy Murray (GBR) 11.4% 206 0 WASH (1)Mardy Fish (USA) 20.5% 177 72053 OLY (4)David Ferrer (ESP) 6.7% 159 0 OLY (8)Juan Martin del Potro (ARG) 5.4% 139 0 OLY (5)Jo-Wilfried Tsonga (FRA) 5.2% 137 0 WASH (2)Alexandr Dolgopolov (UKR) 9.3% 117 43662 WASH (8)Sam Querrey (USA) 9.4% 116 43103 WASH (3)Kevin Anderson (RSA) 7.5% 105 37923 Event Player p(W) ePts e$ OLY (6)Tomas Berdych (CZE) 2.8% 103 0 WASH (6)Tommy Haas (GER) 6.0% 93 33053 WASH Xavier Malisse (BEL) 6.1% 89 32440 OLY (10)John Isner (USA) 2.1% 88 0 OLY (7)Janko Tipsarevic (SRB) 1.5% 81 0 OLY (15)Gael Monfils (FRA) 1.6% 78 0 WASH Guillermo Garcia-Lopez (ESP) 4.5% 77 27317 WASH (5)Benoit Paire (FRA) 3.6% 74 25334 WASH Benjamin Becker (GER) 4.1% 74 25884 OLY (13)Marin Cilic (CRO) 1.3% 73 0 Event Player p(W) ePts e$ OLY (16)Kei Nishikori (JPN) 1.2% 71 0 WASH (7)Jeremy Chardy (FRA) 2.9% 67 22754 WASH Nicolas Mahut (FRA) 3.0% 63 22023 WASH Igor Andreev (RUS) 2.8% 62 21495 OLY (12)Juan Monaco (ARG) 0.8% 62 0 OLY Andy Roddick (USA) 1.1% 61 0 WASH James Blake (USA) 2.6% 60 20640 OLY David Nalbandian (ARG) 1.0% 59 0 WASH Jesse Levine (USA) 2.4% 58 19924 OLY (11)Gilles Simon (FRA) 0.7% 57 0 Event Player p(W) ePts e$ OLY Mikhail Youzhny (RUS) 0.9% 56 0 OLY (9)Nicolas Almagro (ESP) 0.6% 56 0 OLY (14)Fernando Verdasco (ESP) 0.6% 54 0 OLY Milos Raonic (CAN) 0.8% 53 0 WASH Marinko Matosevic (AUS) 1.9% 52 18046 WASH Bjorn Phau (GER) 1.8% 52 17849 OLY Stanislas Wawrinka (SUI) 0.7% 52 0 WASH Matthew Ebden (AUS) 1.8% 52 17731 OLY Richard Gasquet (FRA) 0.7% 50 0 WASH Michael Russell (USA) 1.7% 50 17193 Event Player p(W) ePts e$ OLY Philipp Kohlschreiber (GER) 0.6% 49 0 WASH Jurgen Zopp (EST) 1.4% 47 16140 WASH Edouard Roger-Vasselin (FRA) 1.3% 46 15794 OLY Jurgen Melzer (AUT) 0.5% 45 0 OLY Feliciano Lopez (ESP) 0.5% 45 0 OLY Bernard Tomic (AUS) 0.5% 44 0 WASH Flavio Cipolla (ITA) 1.1% 43 14820 OLY Marcos Baghdatis (CYP) 0.4% 42 0 WASH Tobias Kamke (GER) 1.0% 41 14169 OLY Ivo Karlovic (CRO) 0.3% 40 0 Event Player p(W) ePts e$ WASH Igor Kunitsyn (RUS) 0.8% 38 13472 WASH Paul Capdeville (CHI) 0.8% 37 13175 OLY Victor Troicki (SRB) 0.3% 37 0 OLY Radek Stepanek (CZE) 0.3% 36 0 OLY Nikolay Davydenko (RUS) 0.2% 36 0 OLY Grigor Dimitrov (BUL) 0.2% 33 0 OLY Ryan Harrison (USA) 0.2% 33 0 OLY David Goffin (BEL) 0.2% 32 0 OLY Denis Istomin (UZB) 0.2% 32 0 WASH (4)Pablo Andujar (ESP) 0.4% 32 11438 Event Player p(W) ePts e$ OLY Andreas Seppi (ITA) 0.1% 31 0 OLY Jarkko Nieminen (FIN) 0.1% 31 0 OLY Ivan Dodig (CRO) 0.1% 31 0 WASH Tommy Robredo (ESP) 0.5% 31 11363 OLY Lukasz Kubot (POL) 0.1% 30 0 WASH Paul-Henri Mathieu (FRA) 0.4% 28 10836 OLY Steve Darcis (BEL) 0.1% 28 0 OLY Lukas Lacko (SVK) 0.1% 27 0 OLY Santiago Giraldo (COL) 0.1% 26 0 OLY Thomaz Bellucci (BRA) 0.1% 26 0 Event Player p(W) ePts e$ OLY Mikhail Kukushkin (KAZ) 0.1% 26 0 OLY Dmitry Tursunov (RUS) 0.1% 25 0 OLY Alejandro Falla (COL) 0.1% 25 0 OLY Donald Young (USA) 0.1% 25 0 OLY Alex Bogomolov Jr (RUS) 0.1% 25 0 OLY Lu Yen-Hsun (TPE) 0.1% 24 0 OLY Olivier Rochus (BEL) 0.1% 24 0 OLY Sergiy Stakhovsky (UKR) 0.0% 23 0 OLY Gilles Muller (LUX) 0.0% 23 0 WASH Leonardo Mayer (ARG) 0.2% 23 9502 Event Player p(W) ePts e$ OLY Robin Haase (NED) 0.0% 22 0 WASH Federico Delbonis (ARG) 0.2% 22 9354 OLY Vasek Pospisil (CAN) 0.0% 21 0 OLY Malek Jaziri (TUN) 0.0% 21 0 OLY Fabio Fognini (ITA) 0.0% 20 0 OLY Tatsuma Ito (JPN) 0.0% 20 0 WASH Joao Souza (BRA) 0.1% 20 8981 WASH Horacio Zeballos (ARG) 0.1% 19 8901 OLY Go Soeda (JPN) 0.0% 19 0 OLY Martin Klizan (SVK) 0.0% 19 0 Event Player p(W) ePts e$ OLY Somdev Devvarman (IND) 0.0% 18 0 OLY Blaz Kavcic (SLO) 0.0% 18 0 WASH Ruben Ramirez Hidalgo (ESP) 0.0% 16 8272 OLY Carlos Berlocq (ARG) 0.0% 14 0 OLY Lleyton Hewitt (AUS) 0.0% 14 0 OLY Adrian Ungur (ROU) 0.0% 11 0
Don’t you think the points are cheaper at Washington because the other players are at London?
That’s a big part of why. If 1 player switched, he’d get a really good deal–i.e. he’d have a shot at considerably more points. If 2 players switched, both players would get a better deal, though not as good as the first one. Eventually, some number of switchers would make things even out, but I’d guess it would take 6 or 7 of the top 20, even without considering prize money.
Totally love the way you approach stats. And I dig your writing style tool. In the opening paragraph of this post, I agree with the precious metals, prestige, and national pride. But the horny women part only applies to the men who are interested in women. None of the top athletes are out, but statistically, quite a number of them would be more interested in horny men.