Tennis is one of the sports to feature at Oundle Museum’s 2012 exhibition themed on the Olympics.

The exhibition opens in March.

Tennis was one of the eight sports played at the first modern Olympics in 1896. The other sports were Athletics, Cycling, Wrestling, Swimming, Fencing, Gymnastics, and Shooting. There were no women athletes.

The competition was held at the courts of the Athens Lawn Tennis Club, and the infield of the velodrome used for the cycling events. Although tennis was already a major sport by the end of the 19th century, none of the top players turned up for the tournament in Athens. John Pius Boland representing Great Britain won the event. He was born in Dublin on the 16th of September 1870 and having become interested in tennis at an early age was encouraged by his teachers at the Catholic University School, Leeson St, Dublin, he continued playing from time to time in Oxford, where he had begun studying.

He had been entered in the competition by a fellow-student of his at Oxford; the Greek, Konstantinos Manos. As a member of the Athens Lawn Tennis sub-committee, Manos had been trying, with the assistance of Boland, to recruit competitors for the Athens Games from among the sporting circles of Oxford University. In the first round, Boland defeated Friedrich Traun, a promising tennis player from Hamburg, who had been eliminated in the 100 meter sprint competition.

He would go on to become a member of the British parliament for South Kerry from 1900 to 1918, representing the Irish Nationalist party.

The men’s singles was one of two tennis events at the games. The sixteen entrants were seeded into a single-elimination tournament, with only thirteen of the players actually competing. They represented six nations.

1896 Singles Results

Early Olympic Games allowed for individuals in a team to be from different nations. Boland (GBR) and Traun (GER) decided to team up for the doubles event and defeated their Greek and Greek/Egyptian opponents in the final after losing the first set.

1896 Doubles Medalists

 Tennis was played at the Olympics until 1924, and then reinstituted in 1988.

Britain’s last Olympic medal in tennis came at Atlanta in 1996 when Tim Henman and Neil Broad won the silver medals in the doubles.

The last gold medals were won at Antwerp in 1920 when Oswald Turnbull and Max Woosnam claimed the men’s doubles and Kathleen McKane and Winifred McNair the women’s doubles. The last British player to claim a singles title was Edith Hannam, who won the indoor event at Stockholm in 1912.

Information from wikipedia