Defending champion Serena Williams has been seeded eighth for next week’s Wimbledon championships, but sister Venus is down at 24th after the All England Club’s seedings committee met yesterday.
Serena was top of the WTA rankings when she won her fourth Wimbledon singles title last year, her 13th major singles crown in all, but is now down at 26 after 11 months out through injury and serious health problems.
Venus, who has won five Wimbledon singles titles, but is now ranked 33, also made a comeback in Eastbourne after not playing since the Australian Open because of abdominal and hip injuries.
Speaking on the eve of the draw, 18-time Grand Slam champion Chris Evert said she expected both Williams sisters to be amongst the top 16 seeds at Wimbledon.
The sisters, who between them have won nine of the last 11 singles titles at Wimbledon, have been upgraded at the discretion of the All England Club to ensure “a balanced draw.”
The rest of the seedings follow the WTA rankings, with Denmark’s world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki topping the draw.
Belgium’s Kim Clijsters is seeded second.
The men’s seedings, based mainly on the ATP rankings on Monday, but which can be tweaked to reflect grass-court form, have a top four of defending champion Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, six-time champion Roger Federer and Andy Murray.
American Andy Roddick, three times a runner-up, has earned the eight seeding spot despite a current ranking of 10, which means he will avoid the “big four” until the quarter-finals.
Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga has also been shunted up to 12th from a ranking of 19 after his run to the Queen’s Club final where he lost to Murray.
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