Federer is back, ladies and gents. OK. Maybe not. But he was good enough to beat Berdych in straight sets today. Berdych has been really disappointing in the past few years and has shown that while he has a ton of potential, he’ll probably compete with Gasquet with the underachiever of his generation. Federer was behind 3-0 in the 2nd set and he still won it! That tells me Berdych is not confident.

Blake is one confident bloke. He beat Simon again 6-4, 6-2, and now gets his shot at Federer. Now that is goign to be a true test of form for Roger. If he loses to Blake, his era is finally done and dusted, forever! But if he beats Blake easily, then there is hope for him.

Djokovic and Nadal are on the collision course as they both won comfortably. Nadal beat Andreev yet again and Djokovic dominated Youzhny. Djokovic now goes against Monfils as a prohibitive favorite, and you can say the same about Nadal. So we are going to get Federer vs. Gonzalez, Nadal vs. Djokovic in the semis. Can Gonzo pull off the upset and win the Olympics? We shall see.

Olympics are finally here, and we are done with the first two rounds. Federer has surprisingly bounced back from his terrible form to produce some sublime tennis to beat Tursunov and a qualifier in 4 straight sets. Nadal on the other hand was not that lucky against Strace and was stretched to three sets before taking that last set 6-2. Nadal was much better today as he put a beat down on the former No. 1 Hewitt, beating the poor Aussie 6-1, 6-2. Considering that Hewitt used to dominate Nadal on the hard courts, the result today shows us two things! Nadal is a far better player this year (duh!), and Hewitt should really contemplate his future as he is very limited with his injured hip.

But Djokovic is having the best tournament so far. He not only won against tough guys, Ginepri and Scheuttler, easily, he knows now that Andy Murray is out of the tournament after a first round loss to a qualifier. So there is really no one in the draw that he hasn’t beaten recently. He does have to face Nadal in teh semis but I would give Novak a very good chance to upset Nadal yet again.

Blake was in action today as well and he survived a tough test against Dominic Herbaty. Blake flirted with disaster when he let go of a break up situation in the 2nd set to fall a break down on the third set. Thankfully he was able to bounce back and put Herbaty out. So we will get to see the rematch of Blake - Simon, which should be very good (my money is on Simon).

The Olympics have been shown on NBC online as TV has almost not shown any footage of these games. NBC claims that the matches will be shown 2 am in the morning, so I decided to call their bluff. Not surprisingly, they showed Beach Volleyball for guys, which was OK but was no tennis. But thankfully the matches are shown online with no commentary. It’s better than nothing at this point!