Anastasia Potapova climbed in Upper Austria

The champion of the Upper Austria Ladies Linz, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) 250 tournament with a prize fund of €225,000, was Russia’s Anastasia Potapova, who defeated Croatia’s Petra Martic in straight sets. This success allowed the 21-year-old tennis player, who won the junior Wimbledon in 2016, to become the 31st racket of the world for the first time. Meanwhile, at another WTA tournament, the Mubadala Abu Dhabi Open, which ended in the UAE, another Russian woman, Lyudmila Samsonova, did not convert three match points and lost to Swiss Belinda Bencic.

Last Sunday almost confirmed a very beautiful trend, which began to be traced back in the second half of last season. Then in August and September, three times two Russian tennis players simultaneously played the finals at WTA tournaments, showing a 100% result and winning a total of six titles. And now, the ideal end of the weekend for the Russians was very close, but Lyudmila Samsonova let us down a little. Having shown very high-quality attacking tennis in the 500 category competition in Abu Dhabi, she had three match points in the tie-break of the second game of the decisive meeting with Belinda Bencic, who is coached by Russian Dmitry Tursunov, but did not manage to finish the more experienced Swiss player and lost in almost three hours – 6:1, 6:7 (8:10), 4:6. This is the first defeat of Samsonova in the finals after four victories in a row. Nevertheless, by the end of the week, she will rise in the ranking from 19th to 15th place, the highest in her career.

But quite unexpectedly, Anastasia Potapova, the champion of the junior Wimbledon 2016 and the fifth racket of Russia, distinguished herself quite unexpectedly. She managed to win the Upper Austria Ladies Linz – a tournament that has a relatively low 250 category, but a very rich history. Suffice it to say that in different years the winners in Linz, the administrative center of the federal state of Upper Austria, were such well-known representatives of different generations as Belgian Justine Henin, Czechs Yana Novotna and Petra Kvitova, French women Marie Piers and Amelie Mauresmo, American Lindsey Davenport, Belarusian Victoria Azarenka and newly minted Australian Open champion Arina Sobolenko. Three Russians also appear on this list – Maria Sharapova, Nadezhda Petrova and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.

Potapova came to Linz from Lyon, where a week earlier she reached the quarterfinals at a similar tournament in the 250 category, having received a minor leg injury. The situation was aggravated by the fact that all four matches of the Russian woman before the final consisted of three games. The meeting with the Italian Lucia Bronzetti (66th in the world), and the confrontation with two Germans – Jule Niemeyer (71st) and Anna-Lena Friedsam (124th), and the semi-final against the finalist of Roland Garros 2019 and the silver prize-winner of the Tokyo Olympics Czech Marketa Vondrousova (89th). In total, on the way to the final, Potapova spent 8 hours and 49 minutes on the Austrian courts. True, in the end, her opponent was not the Greek Maria Sakkari, the seventh racket of the world and the main favorite of the tournament, but the Croatian Petra Martic, who knocked her out in the semifinals, ranked 34th in the ranking. With vast experience, a good first serve and a fairly aggressive game, this relatively tall tennis player is not always distinguished by psychological stability – a quality that Potapova showed brilliantly. By the way, she has been trained by Igor Andreev for about two years now, who, as a captain, led the Russian team in 2021 to victory in the Billie Jean King Cup.

Having conceded in the very opening of the meeting, the Russian woman was able to impose a stubborn struggle on Martic in several important games of the first game and gradually seized the initiative. As a result – 6:3, 6:1 in just 1 hour and 16 minutes. Potapova brilliantly managed to use the Croatian’s not very strong second serve, winning almost three-quarters of the goals on it – 19 out of 26. The reward for the patience that the Russian woman needed for several days in a row was her second WTA title in her career. The first was won in April last year in Istanbul. In addition, Potapova has three finals, played in 2018 in Moscow and Tashkent and last summer in Prague. Having such a list of achievements to its credit, one can claim further progress in the ranking, where the Russian woman rose from 44th place to the highest 31st position in her career.

Evgeny Fedyakov