1 Rouble Tennis

Part of Russia's Olympic Sports series, this rouble was issued in anticipation of growing Russian investment in tennis infrastructure following the sport's reintroduction to the Olympics at Seoul in 1988. Russian players had been largely absent from the top tier of international competition during the Soviet decades, when tennis was officially discouraged as a bourgeois pursuit — systematic development only accelerated through the 1990s, eventually producing the generation of players who would dominate the early 2000s tour.