Fourth seed Milos Raonic hit 12 aces and saved all five break points he faced as he beat Steve Johnson of the US 7-6 (7/4), 6-4 in the first round of the Swiss Indoors on Tuesday.
Johnson, who did not face a break point in the first set, saved one on his opening service game in the second, where he also missed four chances to break Raonic’s serve.
The 1.95m Canadian sealed victory by breaking Johnson’s serve for the first time in the 10th game. He next faces Donald Young of the US.
Photo: EPA
Mikhail Kukushkin upset third seed Stanislas Wawrinka of Switzerland 6-4, 6-7 (1/7), 6-3 later on Tuesday.
The 84th-ranked Kazakh converted four of his 10 break-point chances to set up a second-round match with Germany’s Benjamin Becker, who needed just over an hour to breeze past qualifier Gastao Elias of Portugal 6-3, 6-2.
Meanwhile, eighth seed Ivo Karlovic had 23 aces as he advanced to the second round with a 7-6 (7/4), 6-3 win against Lukas Rosol.
The 35-year-old Karlovic won 95 percent of his first-serve points and next plays Frenchman Kenny de Schepper, who beat Argentina’s Federico Delbonis 7-6 (7/3), 7-5.
Croatia’s Ivan Dodig needed nearly three hours to get the better of Swiss wild-card Marco Chiudinelli 6-4, 6-7 (5/7), 6-4 and next plays seventh seed David Goffin of Belgium.
Canada’s Vasek Pospisil needed just under two hours to defeat Jarkko Nieminen of Finland 6-3, 6-7 (4/7), 6-4 in the late match. The 24-year-old Pospisil next faces fifth seed Grigor Dimitrov or German wild-card Alexander Zverev.
Top seed Roger Federer and No. 2 Rafael Nadal, who struggled with appendicitis earlier this month in Shanghai, were in second-round action yesterday.
Federer, a recent winner in Shanghai, was due to face Luxembourg’s Gilles Muller and Nadal was taking on unheralded Frenchman Pierre-Hugues Herbert, a qualifier ranked 120th.
VALENCIA OPEN
AFP, VALENCIA, Spain
Fifth seed John Isner crashed out of the Valencia Open in the first round to Spanish veteran Tommy Robredo 7-6 (7/3), 6-3 on Tuesday.
The American, who has only won two matches in four visits to Valencia, lost the opening set in a tiebreak after neither man could make an impact on the other’s serve.
World No. 21 Robredo got the all-important break in the penultimate game of the match, before serving it out for a first win over Isner in four attempts.
Robredo was due to face Taiwan’s Lu Yen-hsun in the second round yesterday.
Fourth seed Feliciano Lopez had an easier afternoon as he eased past Slovakia’s Norbert Gombos 6-4, 6-4 in little over an hour to set up a round-of-16 meeting with fellow Spaniard Pablo Carreno Busta.
Big-serving Kevin Anderson of South Africa was also a winner in straight sets as he downed Germany’s Philipp Kohlschreiber 6-3, 6-4.
Anderson is a potential quarter-final opponent for Andy Murray, who was due to continue his quest to reach the ATP World Tour Finals against Jurgen Melzer yesterday, and will face Slovakia’s Martin Klizan in the second round.
Gilles Simon was another seed to fall as the Frenchman was swept aside by Alexandr Dolgopolov 6-0, 6-3, while Italy’s Fabio Fognini enjoyed an unusually drama-free day as he cruised past Spaniard Albert Ramos-Vinolas 6-4, 6-2.
The top two seeds, David Ferrer and Thomas Berdych, were due to get their campaigns underway yesterday against Andreas Seppi and Pablo Andujar respectively.
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