"Olympic Experience" (Part II)

The tournament lasted three days. But since work had been busy, I could only travel on day one and play on the last two days. With two matches per day, I played four doubles matches under the very hot sun.

By the time I played my first match, my team had won both line-ups on Friday, so we were in great position to advance (each line-up included 5 matches; a team had to win at least 3 matches to win the line-up). As soon as I started my match, I noticed my back was stiff. But the match went well, and my captain gave me a back message after the win! After this round robin, we advanced to the championships round for another three rounds of matches to play other round robin winners in our division.

I played my next match with another teammate. My back issue remained (it turned out the extra firm mattress was too much for my back) but the pain-relieving patch my captain put on me before the match helped. My doubles partner and I won the first set quite smoothly, but we lost serve and the second set 4-6.

The third set (and the match) was decided by the doubles tiebreak instead of a full set. We lost a few points early, but the tiebreak was fairly even before we saved a couple of match points. Then our turn came. We had match point! However, I missed a volley.  Soon, it was our opponents' match point again and we lost the match when they called my partner's shot out.

After the match, my partner and I were very disappointed. In the end, it did not affect the result, since our team won the other matches and we were still on the winning side of the line-up. Our teammates circled around us to cheer us up. They also told us that they all saw the last shot in. However, because our opponents called it out, we lost.

But I learned an important lesson. As we walked off the court, I told myself that I could take the loss. That helped me keep my emotions from overtaking me. Instead of dwelling on the loss or those few points that determined the match, I decided to accept the defeat (as a sidebar, Rafa Nadal is the best role model on how to deal with losses), learn from it, not let it bother me or define my tournament, and move on. I had had tough losses and disappointments before, but I now really understood that the best way to deal with defeats was to accept them head-on, not ignore or run from them.

To be continued