Jelena Ostapenko has produced an incredible performance against Simona Halep in the Roland-Garros final, belting a backhand winner for her first major title on Saturday.
Jelena Ostapenko completed her wonderful and wholly improbable two-week journey from teenage hopeful to dazzling Grand Slam champion on Saturday when she came from a set down to blitz Simona Halep at Roland-Garros with one of the tournament’s most stupendous performances.
Tennis was left hailing perhaps its most startling women’s champion in a generation as the unseeded Ostapenko, ranked only 47th in the world and without a single tour-level title to her name before the tournament, came from a set and 3-0 down to destroy the Romanian favourite 4-6, 6-4, 6-3 with a blizzard of winners on Philippe-Chatrier Court.
Just two days after celebrating her 20th birthday, Ostapenko left the whole nation of Latvia in raptures after becoming their first-ever Grand Slam champion and the utterly fearless manner in which she achieved her incredible triumph in a classic final identified her as a welcome new luminary for the sport.
The decisive shot was her 54th winner of a match that lasted a minute under two hours – and while it should also be pointed out that she made exactly the same number of unforced errors, the enduring memory will be of the flashing strokes sending Halep scrambling around desperately to try to stay with her. She ran 400 metres further than her young opponent during a match played in sapping heat. Halep made just 10 unforced errors in the match, a measure of her excellence, yet it always felt as if she might not survive this trial by fire with the match never really being on her racquet.
In today’s men’ singles final, former champions Rafael Nadal and Stan Wawrinka face off for the 2017 Roland-Garros title, with the Spaniard chasing an unprecedented Grand Slam Decima and the Swiss eyeing his fourth major in as many years.
This post was published on June 11, 2017 6:32 pm