Second-round action at the US Open began with a shock and ended with some late-night drama as men’s third seed Stanislas Wawrinka barked at fans before shouting for joy at his 6-3, 6-4, 3-6, 7-6 (7/1) win over Thomaz Bellucci on Wednesday.
The day got off to an explosive start, with Chinese doubles specialist Peng Shuai upsetting fourth-seeded Agnieszka Radwanska of Poland 6-3, 6-4, and finished under the floodlights in the early morning hours with Wawrinka losing his cool and snapping at the rowdy crowd before escaping with a testy win.
After cruising through the opening two sets, Wawrinka had appeared set for a routine victory, but the Swiss suddenly found himself in a titanic struggle with both the 95th-ranked Brazilian and some spectators.
Photo: AFP
In the third set, Bellucci charged 5-1 ahead to keep the match alive and then secured an early break in the fourth as a frustrated Wawrinka muttered to himself.
With the tension building and the score locked at 5-5 after the Swiss had broken back in the sixth game, Wawrinka’s mumblings turned to open rage as he screamed at one heckler to “shut up man.”
However, the Australian Open champion quickly regained his composure as the set moved to a tiebreak, which he dominated 7-1.
Photo: Reuters
“I was trying to keep the focus, you know, when you drop your level against Bellucci, it is tough,” Wawrinka said in a courtside interview. “He started to play better and it started to be a really tricky match.”
By contrast, Peng, half of this year’s French Open women’s doubles winning pair, quietly went about her business, taking 96-minutes on a sunbaked Louis Armstrong Stadium court to claim the biggest scalp of the tournament so far.
Radwanska, winner of the Montreal hard-court tune-up to the US Open and a semi-finalist at this year’s Australian Open, saved a match point in the ninth game to hold serve for 5-4 and fended off another in the next to briefly delay the upset.
“I had two match points and didn’t make it,” said Peng, who has 16 career doubles wins and in February became the first Chinese player to be ranked as a world No. 1 in tennis. “But I just said ‘fight, fight’ and it’s an amazing time for me.”
Two former champions, fifth seed Maria Sharapova and 19th-seeded Venus Williams, delighted their center court audiences by flashing a little of their fashion style along with some oncourt flair.
Williams, who claimed back-to-back US Open titles in 2000 and 2001, kept pace with younger sister Serena by taming 78th-ranked Timea Bacsinszky of Switzerland 6-1, 6-4 to reach the third round for the first time in four years.
French Open champion Sharapova lost the first set to 95th-ranked Alexandra Dulgheru of Romania, but the five-time Grand Slam winner recovered to register a 4-6, 6-3, 6-2 victory and leave her fans smiling on a breezy Arthur Ashe Stadium court.
In another women’s singles encounter, world No. 2 Simona Halep of Romania beat the heat by hurrying past Jana Cepelova of Slovakia 6-2, 6-1.
Halep, who overcame US college champion Danielle Collins in the opening round after losing a first-set tie-break, wasted little time finding her top form as temperatures soared.
“I started to be more aggressive and hit the ball,” the French Open runner-up said. “I feel great now that I could win so fast today because it’s so hot outside.”
Others advancing included sixth seed Angelique Kerber of Germany, ninth-seeded Serbian Jelena Jankovic and 10th-seeded former world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark.
Johanna Larsson of Sweden, ranked 96th, sent another seed packing with a 5-7, 6-4, 6-2 upset of 21st-seeded US player Sloane Stephens, an Australian Open semi-finalist last year.
On the men’s side, sixth-seeded Czech Tomas Berdych dismissed 2001 champion Lleyton Hewitt of Australia 6-3, 6-4, 6-3, while seventh-seeded Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov eased to a 6-2, 7-6, 6-2 victory over local wild card Ryan Harrison.
Other men’s seeds advancing included Ernests Gulbis of Latvia (11), Marin Cilic of Croatia (14), South African Kevin Anderson (18) and Feliciano Lopez of Spain (19).
Cilic and Lopez advanced in abbreviated fashion. Cilic was leading 6-3, 3-1 when Marcos Baghdatis of Cyprus retired with an ankle injury, while Lopez was at 1-1 in the fifth set when Croat Ivan Dodig could no longer continue due to cramp.
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