The popular alternative to the Wimbledon tennis championships, Anna Kournikova, committed what some will see as her final selfish act when she prematurely departed the stage 6-3, 6-4 to Anne-Galle Sidot.

With two fragile players on the same court it was the unseeded Kournikova who was first to fracture, her serve deserting her before she fell into a fetching game from back court, Sidot sensing that an upset was imminent.

Famously, Kournikova will now move on looking for her first-ever tournament win in the knowledge that, while her broad appeal remains stratospheric, she is slowly tumbling down the pecking order of the world rankings. Sidot, ranked 28 to Kournikova's 19, aced her on the final point to add to the starlet's humiliation.

The 19-year-old, on her third appearance at Wimbledon, had made the quarter-finals as a debutante in 1997, the first player to do so since Chris Evert in 1972. Her slippage will now surely urge her to focus more intensely on her off-court commitments, which, over the last four weeks, have brought her considerably more attention than anything she has achieved playing tennis.

Before this year, Sidot had not won a match at Wimbledon since 1996, but reached a career high of 27 earlier this year. That is of little comfort to Kournikova, a former top-10 player. "I didn't get into the match right away, she played really well after that. She's the type of player that one day everything can go really well or go really badly. Today she played great," said the defensive Kournikova.

"I didn't attack her second serve. I had a few chances where I made a few bad returns and she played well on the important points. I was waiting all day and I got over-excited and over-tired. I don't think I was explosive," she said. Kournikova is left to consider her strong chances of at least carrying off the doubles title with Martina Hingis.

When Serena Williams admitted that it takes longer to thread the beads into her hair (over two hours) than it does to move into round three of the Wimbledon Championships, the image is of another hum-drum day at the office for one half of the "Williams Sisters" act.

Only occasionally do Serena and Venus team up in a Grand Slam event, as sibling love can sometimes express itself with the two popping kicker-serves at each other's head from either side of the net.

While Serena, the eighth seed, but the sole Grand Slam winner in the family, detained Yvette Basting for just 35 minutes, Venus thumped her way past Japan's Ai Sugiyama at a comparatively leisurely rate, winning 6-1, 6-4 in 65 minutes. It took Serena just 12 minutes to bully the 23-yearold Dutch debutant 6-0 in the second set for the match.

Winning almost 90 per cent of the points off her first serve and taking 75 per cent of the total points, Serena's power was evident. When the speed of Serena's filleting of Basting was aired, Venus opened up like a child bursting to tell all. "I think I've done one in thirty minutes," she blurted. "Gala Leon Garcia, second round at the US Open 1997." What Court? "Louis Armstrong Stadium," she quipped.

The two have also been busy trying to deconstruct John McEnroe's alleged comments that they lacked humility. But in the event the elder Williams appeared to dig the hole even deeper.

"I believe that most of the time when Serena and I loose a match, it's because we beat ourselves, not because the other player beats us," she said. "I've been beaten about four times and there was nothing I could do but wave the white flag. But the other times I've beaten myself with unforced errors.

"I think Serena and I have great personalities. We are very polite because that's the way our parents taught us." As one US newspaper headline printed earlier this year, Earth to Venus, Earth to Venus.

In truth, 20th-ranked Sugiyma was a more robust opponent than 186th-ranked Basting, but Serena has just returned from a two-month lay-off because of tendonitis in her knee. For a Williams that is no reason to feel unduly phased.

"Last year I had two months off. I came back. I bounced right back to win the LA tournament and US Open. I said, `You know, Serena, you can do this again'. Just because I had two months off doesn't mean anything at all," she said. Maybe it's just a case of Venus envy.