Welcome to my first ever Geocaching Series: Latrobe City Olympics!
This series is designed to give cachers a tour of different sporting venues around the Latrobe City council. Some are quite grand, while others may not even be in use anymore, but still make for interesting viewing nonetheless.
The entire round-trip can be completed in a couple of hours at a rush, but it is encouraged to enjoy and savour the experience, as well as get involved! There are plenty of opportunites as you travel to spectate, evaluate, and even partake in several of the activities presented.
Every one of these caches is linked, in the sense that each one has a clue, which, when solved will be used to calculate the final co-ordinates of the Closing Ceremony cache, which containes the grand prize, so make sure you find the clue and jot it down!
This cache is the 12th in the series: Tennis.
You will arrive at the Boolarra Recreation Reserve. Here you will see facilities used on the regular for both netball and Aussie Rules football, and over in the corner sits the lonely, decrepit tennis courts. One of them has a very saggy net, the other is missing. I wonder if these still get used? Judging by the lack of maintenance and TLC, probably not.
Tennis as an olympic sport has had two main tenures. It was introduced at the inaugural games in 1896, but was dropped in 1928 due to a conflict between the Olympic committee and the International Lawn Tennis foundation over methods of ranking and definition of amateur players. It was reintroduced at the 1988 Seoul Games, and has been feature ever since. The inaugural gold medallist in the sport was Irish tennis player (later politician) John Boland, who represented Great Britain at the time. In the modern iteration of the sport in 1988, the gold medallists were Miloslav Mečíř (Men's - Czechoslovakia), Steffi Graf (Women's - Germany), Ken Flach/Robert Seguso (Men's doubles - USA), and Pam Shriver/Zina Garrison (Women's doubles - USA). In 1896, Australia (albeit represented as Great Britain at the time) won its first medal in the sport, when Edwin Flack (Australia's sole athlete at that iteration of the games who also won gold medals in track athletics events) won bronze as part of the men's doubles team alongside George Robertson. Australia's first national came in the modern iteration of the games, when Liz Smylie and Wendy Turnbull took out bronze in the Women's doubles in 1988 (Seoul). Two gold medals have been won by Australia in the sport. The first came in 1996 (Atlanta) when Tood Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde won gold in the Men's doubles. Matthew Ebden and John Peers took out gold in 2024 (Paris) in the men's doubles also.
The cache is a micro container. There is ample parking nearby. Please BYO writing stick, and make sure you replace the cache exactly as you found it.