For Canada's world-class doubles players, the Olympics has been a waiting game

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Daniel Nestor waited months to find out if he would represent Canada at the Rio Summer Olympics.

Gabriela Dabrowski is still waiting.

They are the highest-ranked doubles players in Canada. But because of the peculiarities of the Olympic event – a marriage of inconvenience merging professional priorities and love of country for a 10-day period – their participation has depended on the kindness of (relative) strangers.

For Nestor, at 43 the veteran of five previous Games (and a gold medalist in Sydney in 2000 with Sébastien Lareau), the Olympic odyssey began months ago when top Canadian singles player Milos Raonic recruited Vasek Pospisil to play doubles with him.

That left Nestor, despite a ranking that would have otherwise qualified him, out in the cold even though he and Pospisil had represented Canada in London in 2012. He was philosophical about it then, at least publicly, and wisely pointed out that there were still many months to go.

This week, with Raonic having pulled out of the Games, Nestor received the necessary approvals from various federations to step in as a replacement and will play with Pospisil. The two will team up this week in Toronto at the Rogers Cup to prepare.

As for Dabrowski, well, she can only wait and hope.

The indecision of countrywoman Genie Bouchard about whether or not she will go to Rio, a decision the 22-year-old Montrealer says she will make at the last minute, leaves Dabrowski in limbo.

There is nothing in the world the 24-year-old from Gloucester, Ont. would love more than to take part in her first Olympic experience.

Here’s what she had to say about it.

For Nestor, the only thing that gnawed at him a little about the original snub was the lack of support from his federation. A player with his illustrious resumé and long Olympics history, who still is playing at a very high level and whose ATP Tour ranking currently stands at No. 9 in the world, no doubt deserved a public show of support from Tennis Canada.

He would have hoped that someone would step forward – stand up, on some level, and say that not only did he deserve to go to Rio but posit that perhaps Canada's best chances for medals would have been with Raonic focusing on singles rather than take on two events, with the more experienced and more accomplished pair of Nestor and Pospisil focusing on the doubles medal.

But he’s been around long enough to know how these things go.

Here’s what he had to say about that.

The Olympics event, for technical and nationalistic reasons, is a poor cousin to the top ATP and WTA Tour events. And this year, with the additional health concerns and the compressed tournament calendars that result from the addition of the tournament in the middle of the hard-court summer season, the tournament will have some notables missing.

But the doubles is a special case.

There are few top-ranked teams that feature two players from the same country. Two notable exception is are No. 1 men’s team of Nicolas Mahut and Pierre-Hughes Herbert, the Wimbledon champions and the American Bryan brothers. Some countrymen and women team up at the beginning of the season specifically for Olympics purposes (the French team of Kristina Mladenovic and Caroline Garcia are an example), but most understandably stick with their regular partners.

After all, they have a living to make and bills to play.

So, to fly their country’s flags at the Games, regular teams have to split up. Worse, it means that players like Dabrowski and Nestor must count on the participation of highly-ranked singles players from their countries – and also on the fact that those players are also willing to add doubles to a very tight Olympic tournament schedule.

For doubles players to be eligible to pick a partner from his or her own country to team up with, they have to be ranked in the top 10. Nestor is ranked there at the moment but at the entry deadline, he was just outside it.

For mixed doubles, it gets even more complicated; only players who already are on the rosters for singles and doubles can take part, and even then only a dozen teams can get directly in.

There are no other options for Dabrowski, who is ranked No. 44 in doubles and playing some very good tennis this season. The next-ranked Canadian player is Sharon Fichman at No. 139. That’s not nearly high enough to get them into the 32-team draw and besides, Fichman has played very little this season.

It’s a tough spot, and rather unfair, although it's really no one's fault.

Pospisil is also waiting for Bouchard’s decision to plan for whether he will play in the mixed doubles event in addition to singles and doubles.

For Nestor, as it turns out, there were options. And the timing of Raonic’s decision ended up having an impact on the third-best doubles player in Canada, Pickering, Ont.’s Adil Shamasdin.

Dabrowski can only spend the week in Montreal patiently waiting, while Bouchard decides her fate.