Serena Williams Regains World Number One Ranking
By Ken Miller, Lawn Tennis Analyst, Posted: Saturday, October 17, 2009 5:19pm PST USA
|
TOKYO--(lawntennis.org) Monday the American Serena Williams dethroned her predecessor the former world number one Dinara Safina of Russia, who had questionably topped the WTA Tour's rankings despite never winning a grand slam title.
Entering this fall's Toray Pan Pacific Open tournament, a mandatory WTA Tour event, Williams trailed Safina by only a slight number of rankings points. Then when the American finished with a better result than the Russian, Williams surpassed Safina in the rankings. As the Tokyo tournament is a required event, Safina was unable to disregard her early round result in her “best of” WTA Tour rankings total as she had in oftentimes.
Safina, who had for weeks suffered poor results, fled the tennis court in tears after turning in another early round defeat to an unknown player then skipped her Tokyo post match press conference in an act which did nothing to promote the WTA Tour.
Williams, who physically overpowers many of her opponents on the tennis court, turned professional in 1995 but only competed full-time
on the WTA Tour several years later.
In 1999, Williams took her first of eleven career singles grand slam titles at the US Open at age 17.
|
Serena Williams of the USA |
|
|
In their lone meeting this year, Williams crushed Safina 6-0, 6-3 in the Australian Open final in January.
Then from May of 2002 through January of 2003, Williams won the French Open, Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open all in a row to become the last tennis player male or female to hold all four of tennis' most prestigious titles all at once.
Although Williams has suffered several grand slam defeats to her older sister and main tennis rival Venus Williams, ranked number three, the younger sister topped her older sister in July in this year's Wimbledon final to claim her third career Wimbledon singles title. The Williams sisters also won this year's Wimbledon doubles title.
In their lone meeting this year, Williams crushed Safina 6-0, 6-3 in the Australian Open final in January. Williams leads Safina head to head 6-1.
Safina scored a top WTA Tour ranking earlier this year in part due to her consistently reaching WTA Tour finals while Williams suffered a leg injury which saw her lose four matches in a row.
However since August, Safina has dropped four of her last seven matches, the last a straight set defeat to the 226th ranked Shuai Zhang of China.
Share:  Facebook
Digg
|
Copyright Lawn Tennis 1997-2009 | Home
|
|
