#australian-open

#australian-open

Had you been at Roland Garros around supper time Wednesday evening and heard the crowd of nearly 10,000 fans chanting Lucas Pouille's name at a near deafening level, you would have assumed you had just missed a triumphant performance.Not even close.Pouille, a 29-year-old Frenchman, on the court named for Suzanne Lenglen, the French tennis star of the 1920s, lost in straight sets to Cameron Norrie, a Briton to add insult to injury, in less than two hours.

Owen Davidson, an Australian tennis player who formed a dominant mixed doubles team with Billie Jean King in the 1960s and '70s, winning eight Grand Slam titles with her, along with five doubles titles with other partners, died on Friday in Conroe, Texas, a suburb of Houston.He was 79.The cause was cancer, his longtime friend Isabel Suliga said.

Jessica Pegula, the professional tennis player, has revealed details for the first time about the health of her mother, Kim Pegula, a co-owner and president of the Buffalo Bills and the Buffalo Sabres, describing how she went into cardiac arrest last year and is still struggling to recover.In an essay published in The Players' Tribune on Tuesday, Jessica Pegula said she was writing about it now because she wanted to be more open after Damar Hamlin, the Bills defensive back, went into cardiac arrest during a game on Jan. 2.

MELBOURNE, Australia The tennis breakthroughs keep coming for Tommy Paul and his American friends.Taylor Fritz became the first of their peer group to win a Masters 1000 title last year at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif.A few months later, Frances Tiafoe became the first of their group to reach a Grand Slam semifinal in singles, pushing eventual champion Carlos Alcaraz to five sets.

Long day for the Andreeva family.First came an early rise to get Mirra, a 16-year-old Russian, ready for her 11 a.m.French Open debut against Alison Riske-Amritraj of the United States.Mirra was as efficient as they come, finishing her match Tuesday in 56 minutes by improvising an array of easy, smooth winners against an opponent twice her age.

MELBOURNE, Australia Keep fighting, Serena Williams said to an 18-year-old Sania Mirza when they met at the net after a match at the Australian Open.That was in January 2005, and Mirza, strong-minded to begin with, took even more strength from the advice.A Muslim from Hyderabad, India, who started playing tennis on courts made of cow dung, Mirza became the most successful women's tennis player in India's history at an early age but kept pushing for more, experiencing success above all in doubles and in inspiring women from South Asia and beyond to think bigger.

On Monday, the girlfriend of the American tennis player Frances Tiafoe posted a video from what she called a fashion show.In it, Mr. Tiafoe, ranked 17th in the world, tried on a kit sent to him by Nike, his sponsor, as he readied for the Australian Open.It's definitely a lot, but I'm here for it, his girlfriend, Ayan Broomfield, a tennis player from Canada, says as Mr. Tiafoe walks to a mirror to see the outfit: a sleeveless top and shorts covered in multicolored waves, like an oil slick rainbow or a lava lamp.

Naomi Osaka, a four-time Grand Slam champion, has withdrawn from the Australian Open, the latest turn in an increasingly enigmatic career.The Australian Open announced Osaka's withdrawal on Sunday in Melbourne.Dayana Yastremska will now move into the main draw of the tournament, which starts Jan. 15.

Tennis players commonly hit three types of backhands  topspin, flat and slice  yet on the forehand, they have, in the modern game, traditionally limited their arsenal of shots to just the first two.The forehand slice  which involves sliding the racket beneath the ball to create backspin or sliding it to the left or right of the ball to create side spin  is used for drop shots but has long been frowned upon as a desperate play in an extreme situation.

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau.Sign up to get it by email.This week's issue is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter in Melbourne.The Australia Letter recently celebrated its sixth birthday.Over more than 300 issues, we've shared the back stories to our reporting trips, offered local recommendations and served up slices of life down under.

Last August, Diana Shnaider, a teenage tennis player from Russia, was traveling solo in Europe with a world-class forehand but no working bank card because of financial sanctions against her country.She had to pay for hotels, flights and food with cash.Last week, she led the North Carolina State women's tennis team, which is ranked ninth in Division I, to a victory over second-ranked Ohio State.

Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa explained the significance of the Chicxulub impact crater to actor Domhnall Gleeson over a drink of negroni sbagliato in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia," is the kind of sentence that just might tie your tongue up in knots.It contains five examples from this year's list of the most mispronounced words released Wednesday by The Captioning Group, which since 1991 has captioned and subtitled real-time events on television in the U.S. and Canada.

Lesia Tsurenko of Ukraine reached her first final in four years after the top-seeded Bianca Andreescu retired with a shoulder injury during their semifinal match at the Thailand Open on Saturday.Tsurenko, in search of her fifth WTA title, was leading the 2019 U.S. Open champion 7-5, 4-0 when the Canadian stopped playing.

It's hard to think of a jukebox musical that has been touched by quite so many pop stars.Since & Juliet opened on the West End in 2019 and Broadway in 2022, Katy Perry, Adam Lambert, N Sync and the Backstreet Boys have all come to the show.Kelly Clarkson features on the US cast album, Jessie J on the UK one even Robyn and Harry Styles have come to early developments.

Footage taken at the Australian Open appears to show Srdjan Djokovic, the father of the Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic, posing with fans who were carrying Russian flags and symbols.In the video, posted on a prominent pro-Putin YouTube account, Srdjan Djokovic is briefly seen alongside the fans, one of whom is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the pro-war Z emblem and carrying a flag featuring an image of President Vladimir V. Putin.

Belarusian and Russian flags have been banned from the Australian Open, the governing body for tennis in Australia said on Tuesday, after fans displayed a Russian flag at a first-round match between a Russian and Ukrainian player a day earlier.Tennis along with sports such as figure skating, and track and field has struggled with its response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which Belarus has supported.

Former world-ranked number one tennis player Andy Murray had his marathon run at this year's Australian Open halted on Saturday in a third-round loss to Roberto Bautista Agut.But, it was the two matches before the loss to Agut that had the tennis world talking.Murray had spent more than 10 and a half hours on the court heading into Saturday's match which included a ridiculous two-set comeback to beat Thanasi Kokkinakis.

MELBOURNE, Australia There were 94,854 fans at the Australian Open on Saturday, setting a single-day attendance record.But perhaps even more surprising than the size of the audience was that four American men remained in contention for the men's singles title: Sebastian Korda, Ben Shelton, J.J. Wolf and Tommy Paul.

Coverage: Commentary every day from 07:00 GMT on BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra 'Tennis Breakfast' live from Melbourne, with selected live text commentaries and match reports on the BBC Sport website & app

British number one Emma Raducanu is out of the Australian Open after losing in straight sets to Coco Gauff in a gripping second-round match.

MELBOURNE, Australia Shang Juncheng could have chosen his father's sport of soccer or his mother's sport of table tennis.His father, Shang Yi, was a leading Chinese midfielder, good enough to play for the national team.His mother, Wu Na, was a world champion in doubles.Instead, their son became a tennis player, leaving home in Beijing at age 11 to train at an academy in Florida.

Holger Rune speaks as he plays tennis at a crazy fast pace, barely stopping to take a breath.His thoughts are deep and direct, as if he has much to say but not much time to say it.Rune's footwork is exceptionally speedy, and his ascent up the rankings has kept pace.In just one year, he rose from outside the world's Top 100 to a Top 10 ranking.

MELBOURNE, Australia This country has a well-earned reputation as a land of extremes: fatally poisonous snakes, deadly insects, killer crocodiles, drenching rains and brutal heat.The Australian Open got a fair dose of that Tuesday well, not so much the killer bugs or crocs or snakes, though the park next to the tennis center does have signs warning visitors to beware of snakes.

MELBOURNE, Australia It was a night worthy of a knight, and Sir Andy Murray's stirring comeback victory from two sets down against Thanasi Kokkinakis at the Australian Open also turned into one of the latest nights in tennis history.That is saying something in a sport that is often, too often, played into the wee hours of the morning, but Murray, a stouthearted Scotsman now playing tennis with an artificial hip, needed 5 hours 45 minutes to find a way to prevail against Kokkinakis, a big-serving Australian nearly 10 years his junior.

MELBOURNE, Australia After spending the past week receiving all the laurels of a hometown favorite, Nick Kyrgios suddenly withdrew from the Australian Open on Monday with a knee injury, a little more than 24 hours ahead of his scheduled first-round match.In an interview Friday, Kyrgios, the temperamental Australian star who was a finalist at Wimbledon last year, said he had been battling soreness in his left knee during the off-season, but he expected to be able to play in the year's first Grand Slam.

Tennis Australia is expanding its NFT ball art offering for this year's Australian Open, saying it is in it for the long haul despite the uncertainty in the crypto market.The Open last year launched an AO Artball collection as the hype around all things crypto peaked, with 6,776 ball artworks sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that are linked to 19cm x 19cm plots on the court at Melbourne Park.

Coverage: Daily radio commentaries on 5 Sports Extra/BBC Sport website and app, with selected live text commentaries and match reports on the website and app

Lily Miyazaki lost out in a match tie-break to American Coco Vandeweghe as fellow Briton Jodie Burrage also exited in the final round of qualifying for the Australian Open.

The year's first major tennis tournament suffered a major blow on Friday when Carlos Alcaraz, the precocious men's world No. 1 from Spain, announced that he was withdrawing from the Australian Open with a right leg injury.Alcaraz, a 19-year-old phenom with an acrobatic and all-court game, won his first Grand Slam singles title in September at the U.S. Open in often-spectacular fashion, prevailing in a series of compelling and frequently lengthy matches.

The New York Times Sports department is revisiting the subjects of some compelling articles from the last year or so.In March, the tennis star Ashleigh Barty retired from the sport, less than two months after winning the Australian Open.Here is an update.As the best players in tennis regather in Melbourne, Australia, in January for the first Grand Slam tournament of the year, the reigning women's champion Ashleigh Barty will be back among them  but not to defend her title.

TURIN, Italy  He has been detained and then deported from one country and barred from entering two others that are major stops on the tennis circuit.His steadfast refusal to get vaccinated against Covid-19 has forced him to miss large chunks of the season and to figure out how to stay sharp as he waited by the phone for calls that never came telling him that travel rules had changed.

An unusual link-up!As reported by Abendzeitung, Bayern Munich goalkeeper Manuel Neuer aka "The Wall" and German tennis star Angelique Kerber aka "Kerber Baby" who was ranked as No. 1 for a total of 34 weeks and won major titles at the 2016 Australian Open, the 2016 US Open, and the 2018 Wimbledon Championships are working together as company founders of Deutsche Kosmetikwerke AG which targets personal care products.With the intention of developing new care and sun protection products for active people, the two German giants of their respective sports founded the company.