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By Giri Nathan
[vc_empty_space height="15px"]So many seeds in the women’s draw fell early that the week was sure to unfurl some unexpected Olympic story lines. No. 1 seed Ashleigh Barty, fresh off a Wimbledon title, lost her opener on Sunday. No. 3 seed Aryna Sabalenka, whose dominance has neatly paralleled Barty’s this season, dropped dead on Monday, as did No. 6 seed Iga Swiatek, who wept on court well after her second-round match was through. This left lots of opportunity to be seized, though I could not have predicted that it would be seized by the Czech player Marketa Vondrousova, who blazed into the 2019 French Open final as a 19-year-old, shut down her season with a wrist injury shortly thereafter, and has held a 22–22 record across the two seasons since. But she has put together a star-making Olympic run, and I don’t think I’d appreciated it as one coherent tale until I saw it cheekily laid out as a “villain origin story” by the nimble tennis tweeter Bastian Fachan.