What do you do when you grow up seeing the men of your country rule the world in just the sport you are good at? You try to emulate them. Sweden’s Sofia Arvidsson probably took things a bit too far, though, trying to be like her male counterparts in two disciplines at the same time.You really can’t blame her either, given that the women in Sweden are completely dwarfed by their male counterparts in events like tennis and table tennis. Sofia didn’t see Bjorn Borg play, saw very little of Mats Wilander and a bit of Stefan Edberg, but she grew up in the knowledge that the trio had won 24 Grand Slams between them and the number of decent women’s tennis players in her country probably didn’t number as many. Things were as bad in table tennis. The likes of Jan-Ove Waldner, Jorgen Persson and Mikael Appelgren were putting the Chinese in the shade and the Swedish women could only sit back and admire.As a kid, Sofia was proficient in several disciplines: very good in tennis and table tennis, quite good in football — she was in the boys’ team in her hometown of Halmstad — and swimming.She became the best in her country in tennis and table tennis and that was when trouble started. “While I played tennis with a double-fisted backhand, the forehand was proving to be a big problem. The swings in tennis and table tennis are so different and I was getting confused. But since I was big and strong, I decided to take up tennis,” she said. Her country was teeming with men’s tennis players who were spoilt for choice when it came to picking their idols, but she had only one person to look up to.Tennis fans who followed the game in the 80’s will definitely remember Catarina Lindqvist, a top-20 player who had beaten Steffi Graf twice in five meetings. Sofia got herself enrolled under her wings, until Catarina was named the Fed Cup coach last year. “I am doing okay in singles, but the country’s performance in Fed Cup bothers me. We just got relegated from the elite group,” said the 109th-ranked player.Sofia blamed the Swedish Tennis Federation for the sorry state of affairs. “All they were worried about was how the boys were doing and didn’t make much of an effort with the girls. It’s only recently that we have a pool of promising girls,” she said.Another problem that Sofia thinks had hampered the progress of women in Sweden was the inability to stand up to reality. “Since there were so few women playing the game, anybody who was fairly good got the chance to play abroad. It was only when they began to lose regularly did they realize how bad it was. Many have left the game that way and gone back to studies. Even I had a terrible time when I was 14 years old and in class IX. But, I decided to stick on,” she said.Sofia, who admires Jonas Bjorkman for his fighting spirit, said that her countrymen have a battle on their hands against India in the Davis Cup tie that starts in New Delhi tomorrow. “I won’t be surprised if the Indians win. We probably won’t have a single player left standing in that kind of heat,” she said.
