With a year to go before the Beijing Olympic Games, the Zimbabwe Olympic Committee are sweating on who will partner tennis ace Cara Black at next year's biggest sporting extravaganza.
Black, the country's only professional female tennis player, recently committed herself to representing Zimbabwe at the Games where she is likely to play in both singles and doubles.
The 27-year-old player is currently ranked well outside the top 200 in the world singles rankings but she is likely to get a wildcard from the International Tennis Federation to play singles for Zimbabwe at the 2008 Olympic Games.
But Black, who is currently ranked as the world's top female doubles player, is likely to face a problem in finding a Zimbabwean partner for the doubles match in Beijing.
Although Zimbabwe currently have a number of promising young female players such as Fadzai Mawisire and Fadzai Masiyazi, they all have not yet attained some recognised world rankings that would make them eligible to partner Black in the doubles in Beijing.
And this is already causing some headaches for the ZOC.
Robert Mutsauki, the ZOC chief executive, said earlier this week that they were concerned that Mawisire and Masiyazi were still to attain some "respectable" world rankings that would enable one of them to play doubles with Black at the Beijing Games.
At the Algiers Games, both Masiyazi and Mawisire failed to go beyond the second round in the singles.
The two United States-based players also played together in the doubles but they were dumped out in the second round.
Meanwhile, Mutsauki said they were still hopeful that the country's top clay target shottist Mike Nicholson would get a special invitation from the International Olympic Committee to compete in next year's Olympic Games.
Source: Xinhua
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