Elena Dementieva overcame her own nerves and Jelena Jankovic's gambling style for a 6-3, 4-6, 6-4 victory in the JPMorgan Chase Open final on Sunday.
Dementieva smacked a cross-court forehand winner on her third championship point of the two-and-a-half hour match, then jumped and squealed with delight at winning her second title this year and sixth of her eight-year pro career.
"I feel like it's just starting for me. I'm just getting to my best game," she said. "I just need one more step. I feel young enough. It just takes longer for me."
PHOTO: EPA
Dementieva's nerves were apparent a game earlier, when she sidearmed some serves in and got broken at 5-4 after squandering two match points. She had been a three-time semi-finalist here.
"Finally, a big win," she said. "I hope I'm becoming a more consistent player."
Serving out the match, Jankovic used the new electronic line-calling system to challenge an in call trailing 15-30 -- a gutsy move because if she had been wrong, she would have faced triple match point.
She was right, the ball was out, but her subsequent backhand error set up Dementieva's third and final match point.
"Sometimes she was hitting the ball like she doesn't care. She was hitting hard and everything was in. It was hard to close this match," Dementieva said. "She's very unpredictable. Sometimes she goes for the winner and she has an incredible backhand down the line."
Dementieva, a 24-year-old who was the 2004 French and US Open runner-up, raced to a 5-0 lead in the third set. But Jankovic -- helped by some well-placed volleys -- reeled off four consecutive games to get back in the match after receiving treatment for heat-related symptoms.
"When I was coming back, I made so many good volleys and I said, `Where were those volleys in the beginning?'" she said.
Both players cooled down with ice packs during changeovers. In between sets, Dementieva left the court to change her clothes while Jankovic stayed in the heat and amused herself by watching the stadium's "kiss cam."
"It was hot and we had some long points," Jankovic said. "In the beginning of the third set, I felt really tired and slow."
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