Juan Martin Del Potro and Serena Williams: Dark Horses at Madrid

Two players stand out as we enter this 2012 Madrid Open: Juan Martin Del Potro and Serena Williams.

Both have come into the Madrid tournament as champions on a run of form, with Del Potro a winner at Estoril and Williams the champion at Charleston some weeks back. More interestingly, both are players few have heaped hopes on so far.

We need not overstate the already glittering achievements of Serena Williams, a 13-time Grand Slam champion, who despite not adding to that tally in nearly three years, has been looking primed and sharp. There's a lot of talk going on about Maria Sharapova’s resurgence and Victoria Azarenka’s carving out a new domination in the women’s game, but let's not forget Serena.

She was magisterial in resurrecting her game from the dust of oblivion, having come out of tennis cryosleep, it seems, for months to destroy the opposition in winning Charleston. As some tennis pundits suggested, it was as if the last two years had never happened—winning sets as comfortably as if against opponents from the challenger circuit.

It makes her a tremendous threat at Madrid. She's confident and happy-go-lucky, too, about the blue clay, preferring not to badmouth it but work within it. It worked Monday night when she made her first step in the tournament, beating Elena Vesnina in straight sets.

Del Potro puts up a similar act in the men’s side of the game. The former top-fve player in Argentina, now working his way back into the highest echelons, received a helpful boost of confidence in winning at Estoril last week. As the 2009 U.S. Open champion and a former semifinalist at the French Open, there is no question Del Potro enjoys a surface where he can fully utilize his giant wingspan.

It is almost pterosaur-like, the way he slashes at forehands and casually crushes groundstrokes for winners, and he's in a highly exploitable part of the Madrid draw, too. He likes of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and John Isner stand in his way, admittedly, but he would have gladly accepted it over a Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer, any day.

There is a danger to Del Potro that perhaps has never been fully expressed, if only because injury inhibited any occurrence of this in 2010, and the Big Three have in his comeback thwarted him sufficiently. But a time has to come, and even it if doesn’t happen this week, it seems likely to be happening awfully soon.

As for Serena, it only needs to be said that higher odds are probably on her side, that she wins this Madrid Open outright. It has always been something of a thing of hers, almost that we might surmise it's something of a tactic she employs—surprise and conquer. Riding her super-hot form and winning the tournament outright, beating perhaps Sharapova and Azarenka doing so, would provide enough of a shake-up and stir spicy conversation leading into the French Open.

Mind you, for Serena, though, she would have to win the whole thing, and nothing else, for any such tactic so described to work out. But she just might.