Fourteen-year-old Madison Keys made her WTA Tour debut a memorable one, upsetting Russia’s Alla Kudryavtseva 7-5, 6-4 on Monday in the opening round of The MPS Group Championships.
The American fell behind 5-2 in the first set but used powerful ground strokes to break Kudryavtseva twice to win the set.
Keys lost the first game of the second set before going on a four-game run, and after the 81st-ranked Kudryavtseva fought back to 4-5, Keys won the set with an ace.
“The first two or three games I was nervous,” she said. “It was kind of just the first few games of just hitting the ball and feeling it and really getting into a rhythm that made me feel a lot better.”
OUTFIT
“I actually got into tennis because of Venus and Serena [Williams],” Keys said. “I was watching Wimbledon one year and Venus was playing and I really liked how she was playing but I also liked her outfit.”
“I told my dad I wanted a dress like Venus’ and he said, ‘Only if you play tennis.’ So, I went to Walgreen’s, got a racket and started playing.”
Other ranked players in the field include world no. 12 Caroline Wozniacki, no. 16 Dominka Cibulkova, who lost in last year’s final to Maria Sharapova, and 43rd-ranked Daniela Hantuchova.
In other matches on Monday, third-seeded Dominika
Cibulkova of Slovakia defeated Edina Gallovits 6-2, 6-2, and seventh-seeded
Ukrainian Alona Bondarenko beat India’s Sania Mirza 6-4, 6-3.
In the first round of the doubles Taiwan’s Chan Chin-wei and Carly Gullickson of the United States defeated Akgul Amanmuradova of Uzbekistan and Olga Savchuk of Ukraine, 6-7 (3), 6-2, 10-7.
DOWNSIZED
This year’s tournament, being played at Sawgrass Country Club, has been downsized to go with its new sponsor and a move to a new site.
The tournament, formerly sponsored by Bausch & Lomb, moved from its longtime home in Amelia Island to Ponte Vedra Beach. The total purse dropped from last year’s US$600,000 to US$220,000 with the winner receiving US$37,000.
Last year’s winner, Maria Sharapova, isn’t playing. Other former champions of the tournament include Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, Steffi Graf, Lindsay Davenport, Monica Seles and Venus Williams.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier