Andy Murray is making a habit of accomplishing things that had not been done in a while. Or ever.
Murray on Sunday became the first tennis player in Olympic history with two singles gold medals, winning his second in a row by wearing down Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina 7-5, 4-6, 6-2, 7-5 at the Rio de Janeiro Games in a back-and-forth four-hour final.
“Anything could have happened,” said Murray, who took the last four games after trailing 5-3 in the fourth set.
Photo: AFP
“Emotionally, it was tough. Physically, it was hard,” he said. “So many ups and downs.”
At the 2012 London Olympics, Murray won a singles gold and mixed doubles silver at the All England Club. That, of course, was also the site of his historic 2013 Wimbledon championship, ending the hosts’ 77-year wait for a British man to claim the trophy.
Murray last month again won Wimbledon, raising his Grand Slam title count to three.
On Sunday, second-seeded Murray stopped the resurgent run of 141st-ranked Del Potro, who knocked off No. 1 Novak Djokovic in the first round after getting stuck in an Athletes’ Village elevator for 40 minutes earlier in the day, then beat No. 3 Rafael Nadal in the semi-finals. No man ever has defeated the top three seeds on the way to a gold, but 2009 US champion Del Potro sure came close before winding up with a silver to go alongside his bronze from 2012.
Del Potro had the louder support, and one fan even yelled something as Murray was about to hit a shot two, points from victory. Murray put the ball in the net and glared in the direction the voice came from. Soon after, a spectator was escorted out.
Nadal, the 2008 gold medalist, earlier on Sunday lost 6-2, 6-7 (7/1), 6-3 to Kei Nishikori, whose bronze is Japan’s first Olympic tennis medal since 1920.
The final provided quite a contrast in styles: Murray’s terrific returns, impenetrable defense and track-down-every-ball court coverage against the 198cm Del Potro’s booming serves and furious forehands. In heavy humidity and on a slow hard court, there were plenty of prolonged points. Not all were pretty, as they combined for 102 unforced errors and 85 winners.
They almost went to a fifth set, too, because Del Potro served for the fourth at 5-4, but was broken there, then again in the final game.
“Against Andy,” Del Potro said, “you never know if you’re going to win your serve.”
When Del Potro dumped a backhand into the net to end the match, the opponents met at the net and hugged.
Afterward, both mentioned how tired they were after playing for the fourth consecutive day.
“I’ll try and keep going. And who knows about Tokyo?” Murray said with a laugh, referring to the host city for the 2020 Games. “If I’m still playing in four years, when I’m 33, I don’t imagine I’ll be playing at the same level as now.”
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