Roger Federer gave his hometown fans exactly what they were seeking as the four-time champion moved into the second round of the ATP Swiss Indoors on Monday with a 7-6 (7/3), 6-4 defeat of Potito Starace.
Federer, who is seeded three behind 2009 winner Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, showed some rustiness against the world No. 54 before he claimed his sixth win in six meetings with the Italian.
The Swiss, who was recording his 50th win of the season at a tournament where he was once a teenage ballboy, last competed as he led his nation back to the David Cup World Group with a victory against Australia in Sydney the weekend after the US Open.
Federer, who withdrew from last month’s Asian ATP tournaments to rest his body and cure some niggling injuries, will face either -Brazilian Thomas Bellucci or Finn Jarkko Nieminen.
Despite claiming just one title — his 67th, which came in the first week of the year in Doha — Federer has reached the quarter-finals in 11 of the 13 tournaments he has played this year.
The Swiss needed a tiebreaker in the first set to get on top of Starace, but began the second with a break, which he held throughout the set, and took victory with his second match point.
The 2005 finalist, Marcos Baghdatis, returned to Basel for the first time in three years to post an upset over Serbian eighth seed Viktor Troicki 4-6, 7-6 (8/10), 6-2.
Baghdatis, who lost the 2005 final to Fernando Gonzalez, put out Troicki in two and three-quarter hours with six aces and five breaks of serve.
US Open doubles champion Jurgen Melzer withdrew with back pain before his first round singles match, with the Austrian replaced by Russian lucky loser Mikhail Kukushkin.
Melzer, who lost in the quarter-finals of his home Austrian Open last week, was to have begun in Basel against American Donald Young.
The 30-year-old is said to be in danger of missing the ATP World Tour Finals in London starting in three weeks after he and partner Philipp Petzschner qualified by virtue of winning their second Grand Slam doubles title after Wimbledon last year.
Melzer will also not play next week in Paris Bercy at the Masters 1000, which wraps up the ATP regular season.
VALENCIA OPEN
AP, VALENCIA, SPAIN
Nikolay Davydenko beat fifth-seeded Gilles Simon 6-4, 4-6, 6-3 on Monday in the first round of the Valencia Open, denting the Frenchman’s hopes of qualifying for the ATP World Tour Finals.
Davydenko mostly controlled the match at the City of Arts and Sciences despite dropping the second set, but the 36th-ranked Russian rallied in the decisive set with a forehand winner for a break point and 2-1 lead. Davydenko saved a break point through a drop shot in the sixth game before breaking Simon for the fourth time in the match to secure a second victory in seven meetings against the 12th-ranked Simon.
Simon trails eighth-ranked American Mardy Fish by 720 points, with only the Paris Masters to play before the season-ending tour finals in London. Only the top eight qualify for the Nov. 20 to Nov. 27 tournament in London.
Davydenko will next face French player Nicolas Mahut, who ousted Guillermo Garcia-Lopez 7-6 (5), 6-2.
In Monday’s late match, Vasek Pospisil of Canada needed more than two hours to beat John Isner of the US 6-3, 3-6, 7-6 (9).
Isner bounced back from a shaky first set to hit nine of his 19 aces in the second, but Pospisil outlasted the hard-serving American in the third-set tiebreaker.
Italian player Fabio Fognini also advanced to the second round with a 6-4, 6-3 win over wild card Daniel Gimeno-Traver.
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