Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei yesterday got her Wimbledon campaign off to a winning start by ousting the 30th seed in the first round of the women’s singles a day after Serena Williams said she was still adjusting to the unique challenge of chasing an eighth title while making time for her baby daughter.
World No. 48 Hsieh defeated Russian world No. 29 Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova 6-4, 4-6, 6-3 in 2 hours, 6 minutes at the All England Club in London.
The 32-year-old Taiwanese saved nine of 13 break points and converted five of 17, winning 107 of the 207 points contested to advance to a second-round clash with Spanish world No. 88 Lara Arruabarrena, who defeated Ana Bogdan of Romania 6-1, 3-6, 8-6.
Photo: AP
Williams was on Monday back at Wimbledon for the first time since giving birth to Alexis Olympia in September last year and the former world No. 1 was having to get used to the increased demands on her time.
Few female players have succeeded at Grand Slam level after becoming mothers — only Kim Clijsters did it recently at the US Open in 2009, while Margaret Court and Evonne Goolagong Cawley also won majors after giving birth.
The joys of being a mum have not dulled Serena’s fierce competitive instincts and, aiming to add to her haul of 23 major titles, she started her latest Wimbledon campaign with a 7-5, 6-3 win over Arantxa Rus of the Netherlands, but the 36-year-old conceded it is not easy to come to terms with spending time away from her daughter to focus on tennis.
“It’s hard. I realized at Roland Garros, if the days were long, I was playing singles and doubles there, that was hard because I felt guilty,” she said. “I was like, I haven’t seen Olympia, like what am I doing. If it’s the shorter days, now that I’m not playing doubles in this event, I have the day off, I think that will help. She definitely notices when I’m away. I’m there every day of her life. So she does get super excited when I come back in. You guys are making me miss her... I also think it’s healthy in a way for me to do what I need to do, be that working mom, then go back home and be the mom.”
Having endured complications from her daughter’s birth, Williams was playing only her second Grand Slam this year.
She won her first three matches at the French Open before pulling out due to a pectoral injury.
Since a 2014 third-round loss to Alize Cornet, Williams has now won 15 successive matches at Wimbledon — she took the title in 2015 and 2016 before missing last year’s tournament due to her pregnancy.
Twenty years after making her Wimbledon debut, there were a few signs of rust against Rus and Serena was pleased to get her first Wimbledon match as a mother out of the way.
“I didn’t think about that actually, but it felt good to play, just to be back on the grass. Two years, over a year. It definitely felt good,” she said.
Williams is the second-oldest player in the women’s draw, but even motherhood cannot persuade her to consider retiring when she sees Swiss star Roger Federer thriving at the same age.
“I’m just playing until Roger stops. Gosh, how long? Did he put a time limit on it?” she said. “We in it. We in it together. As long as he’s here, I’m going to try to be here.”
When Paddy Dwyer arrived in China in 1976, crowds jostled to catch a glimpse of him and his companions — the first Western soccer team to play in the country. China was emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and on the brink of market reforms that would take the country from economic stagnation to explosive growth. “All we could see was lines of people running beside our bus, trying to look in the windows, to see their first visual of a white person,” he said. “It was all bicycles,” he said. “There were very few cars to be seen.” Dwyer,
A new NZ$683 million (US$404 million) stadium that was a symbol of Christchurch’s struggle to rebuild after a deadly earthquake struck the New Zealand city is to host its first match tomorrow in front of a sellout crowd. A magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed 185 people in February 2011 and toppled or damaged buildings, including the city’s old Lancaster Park. The stadium, which hosted international rugby and cricket, and was home to the Canterbury Crusaders, was badly damaged and never reopened. It was bulldozed in 2019 and turned into sports fields, leaving the Crusaders without a permanent home. Government funding for a new stadium was
Some of Clearlake Capital Group’s largest investors are growing increasingly concerned about how much time the company’s co-founders are spending on sports investments as they have struggled to complete the fundraising for the private equity firm’s latest flagship fund. One of Clearlake’s co-founders, Behdad Eghbali, has been spending what some investors described as a disproportionate amount of time on the firm’s investment in Chelsea Football Club in recent months. Now, co-founder Jose E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones, are nearing a record US$3.9 billion deal to acquire the San Diego Padres. That personal investment by Feliciano has set off the latest
The Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburg Penguins on Wednesday put a squeeze on the penalty box in Game 3 of their NHL playoff series — with 11 players cramped inside their designated punishment areas. Each could have snapped a team photo after a melee broke out in the second period of the Flyers’ 5-2 win over the Penguins in their Eastern Conference first-round series. “It was a party in there,” penalized Flyers defenseman Nick Seeler said. The celebration extended into the joyous locker room after the Flyers took a 3-0 series lead. Penguins forward Bryan Rust slammed Travis Konecny to the ice behind the
RSS