I was watching for a second reason this year, though, and that reason was named Jennifer Capriati. Jennifer was a teen sensation when she seemingly lost it all. She was away from serious tennis for a few years, and she had problems with drugs and charges of shoplifting.

Jennifer has gotten her life together, though, and coming into Wimbledon, she had won the first two legs of the Grand Slam, the Australian and French Opens. As it turns out, she wound up making it to the semifinals at Wimbledon, and she will be among the favorites later this year at the U.S. Open.

Getting back to the pinnacle after falling to the valley is harder than the original climb, but Jennifer Capriati has done it. In the process, she has rewritten the story of her life, changing what was a tale of wasted potential into a story of personal redemption, and that's a good kind of a story to be able to tell.

Brad Pardee
Editor

For me, though, when I think of Zola Budd, I think of the woman who was forced to seek citizenship in Great Britain in order to compete. You see, Zola Budd is from South Africa, and at the time she competed, South Africa was banned from competing in the Olympics.

Because of South Africa's policy of apartheid, the world shunned South Africa. Its representatives were excluded from the United Nations, its companies boycotted by much of the Western World, and its athletes were banned from international competition.

Now let's be clear that apartheid was evil. It granted rights and privileges to a very small minority and denied them to the vast majority solely on the basis of race. The world was right to respond to South Africa as it did, and over time, the changes came about that brought an end to apartheid and a beginning to democratically-elected majority rule. With these changes came the re-entry of South Africa into the world community, including the Olympics.

The event that brings all this to mind now is the decision of the International Olympic Committee to award the 2008 Summer Olympics to Beijing, China.

China's record of human rights abuses is no better than South Africa's and, in fact, a case could be made that it is worse. Forced abortions and sterilizations. Elimination of religious freedom. The massacre at Tiananmen Square. Beijing's Communist regime has a rap sheet that goes on and on and on.

Why, then, does China receive different treatment than South Africa? The money that can be made from investments in China is undoubtedly a factor. I also suspect that the world responds to the repression of racial minorities more readily than it does to the repression of citizens for other reasons when the fact is that all victims of repression ought to be able to find advocates among the world's leaders and statesmen.

Perhaps there are other reasons that don't come to mind right now. What it all boils down to, though, is an unequal standard that makes us question how much of the ostracism of South Africa was based on principle and how much was based on the fact that the nations of the world didn't figure it would cost them anything. Perhaps Zola Budd's handicap was not that she was a citizen of a repressive regime, but just that she was the citizen of the wrong one.