Caroline Wozniacki, the top women’s seed at the US Open, has a little more work to do before the last Grand Slam of the year starts tomorrow.
The Dane rallied from a break down in the third set to beat Russian Elena Dementieva 1-6, 6-3, 7-6 (7/5) on Friday to book a spot in the final of the Pilot Pen hard-court tournament.
Wozniacki, the tournament’s two-time defending champion, improved to 12-0 in her three trips to New Haven.
Dementieva looked to be cruising when she broke Wozniacki in her first two service games of the match and again to close out the first set, but Wozniacki responded with a service break of her own to open the second set and won the frame when neither player could hold serve during the final four games.
Dementieva took an early lead in the third set and served for the match at 5-4.
“I just told myself: ‘Keep fighting,’” Wozniacki said. “She still has to win four more points to win the match, so you’re still in there.”
Wozniacki took that game, then went up 6-5, but she couldn’t finish off Dementieva, who fought off three match-points and went up 3-0 in the tiebreaker, before Wozniacki rallied again.
Wozniacki, who won last week in Montreal, insisted she doesn’t feel any pressure as the top seed at the US Open.
“Pressure is when you’re put in a spot and you don’t really feel like you belong there,” she said. “When you really believe that you belong there, that you can do the things you have to do, there’s no pressure. You just go out there and play.”
Before she tackles Flushing Meadows, Wozniacki will take on Russian Nadia Petrova in the final in New Haven.
Petrova is making the most of her last-minute wild-card entry and she reached the final with a three-set win over ailing Maria Kirilenko.
After dropping her serve twice in the first set, Petrova bounced back to beat her fellow Russian 2-6, 6-2, 6-2.
Kirilenko was hindered after the first set by a sore back, which she first felt after lunging for a ball. She took a medical timeout in the second set, but said she couldn’t move as well in the later stages.
“I made a very fast movement and then I start to feel it even more,” she said. “Then I couldn’t even bend at all. Then it went a little bit better when the [trainer] came out, but still I decided to continue ... even if you have a pain, you have to try.”
Kirilenko said she would see a doctor before deciding her status for the US Open.
“I saw she had difficulties moving,” Petrova said. “So that was my first goal, keep her on the run, make her stretch, use my serve as a weapon, try to win as many free shots as possible.”
On the men’s side, Sergiy Stakhovsky reached the final with a 6-3, 6-4 win over Thiemo de Bakker of the Netherlands.
The ninth-seeded Ukrainian took advantage of the only break-point in the first set and he broke de Bakker again in the seventh game of the second set.
“I was really lucky to catch that return,” he said of his first break. “I mean, I guess I just decided where he was serving, so I went for it. It went in. It was a really important point for me. I close out the set with my serve and started fresh from the second.”
Stakhovsky will face Uzbek Denis Istomin in the final.
Istomin defeated Serbia’s Viktor Troicki 7-6 (12/10), 3-6, 6-2.
In the women’s doubles semi-finals, US pairing Bethanie Mattek-Sands and Meghann Shaughnessy defeated Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei and Peng Shuai of China 7-5, 6-1 to advance to the final.
Additional reporting by Staff Writer
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