Bad Shots: Funny Photos of Olympic Tennis Players Appear Online

By Erik Gudris

Photo Credit: London Olympics website

2012 Summer Olympics - Tennis Player headshots

(July 18, 2012) -- With the Summer Games in London only nine days away, it appears once again the world's best athletes are being shown off to the world in some rather bizarre looking photos and this time of all places on an official Olympic website, where one can look up profile information on each of the players competing in the Olympic tennis event at Wimbledon. But while you can find each player's name, country and other stats, what jumps out at you right away are the majority of really bad photos taken of them.

Many of the shots have the players simply looking at the camera with no expression at all while others, like the one for Victoria Azarenka (img), looks like they were taken when the person was much younger than they are now or when they had more hair like Gael Monfils or even a beard as with Dimitry Tursunov.

Plenty follow a standard pattern of the player looking like they had just woken up and were told to stare at the camera with their eyes wide open and not even attempt a smile. Some remind one of a driver's license shoot gone horribly wrong with Gisela Dulko and Julia Goerges winding up in that category while many taken of the men look like mug shots. Robert Lindstedt and Jurgen Melzer wear somber faces as if they were repeat offenders while Germany's Philipp Petzchner has a very sick-looking grin on his face as if just got away with something really bad.

It's unclear when or where these photos were taken or who submitted them and some do look better than others. Daniela Hantuchova once again looks stunning (does she ever take a bad picture?) while the Czech women all appear to have worn the same white shirt during their photo shoot. And yet there are some listed without a picture at all, most notably Serena Williams. Does that mean the Wimbledon champion will have to get her photo taken in London before they let her step onto the courts?

This isn't the first time that photos of the Olympics athletes have ended up causing some laughs and perhaps some embarrassment for those who took them. The release of badly lit staged photographs of Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps among others caused a lot of grief for the outlets that used them and for the man who made them.

Though the AFP photographer, Joe Klamer, later said that he came ill-prepared because he didn't realize that he would have the opportunity to shoot the athletes in a studio setting, it still doesn't explain why the official Olympics site would use such poor headshots.

Without a proper explanation, all we can do is shake our head and laugh and be thankful that it's not our face on there. Andy Roddick would probably come up a clever quip about the whole thing, but since he has one of the worst photos of them all with him staring at the camera with his mouth half open as if he just stumbled out of a house party in Austin, maybe it's better if Roddick keeps his mouth shut just this once.