Jelena's next opponent at Berlin, Iroda Tulyaganova, is one of those youngsters who has tasted success on the WTA Tour, the ITF Circuit and has also experienced the wincing agony that injury induces.

The Tashkent-born talent who turned 21 on January 7, 2003 has made rapid strides in her four-year professional career winning three WTA Tour singles crowns, as many ITF Circuit singles titles and has also claimed four doubles crowns.
 
2001 has been the highlight of Irodas career so far. Two back-to-back singles titles and two doubles titles were added to her kitty. She also recorded two victories over top 10 players and three more against top 20 players. Her singles titles came in Vienna, where she came back from a 1-4 deficit to clinch the match in the second round against World No 11
Dementieva; defeating Schnyder in the final. She followed that up with crowning herself at Knokke-Heist, beating worlds No.6, Kim Clijsters (6-0, 6-4 in the SF), her first top 10 victory, and Leon Gracia in the final.

That year she recorded the second fastest serve at 191 km/h and was only one of the five players to defeat Clijsters and Henin, and finished the season at a career best ranking of 20.

And last but not least she took part in one of the most exiting matches i have ever seen! Iroda played Jelena Dokic for the second time in her career (won the first match at Shanghai, 2000, in straight sets) at the semifinals of Linz and after Jelena had won the first set 6-2 Iroda played the best tennis of her life, took the second set and looked like the save winner of that match, as Jelena started to fight back, swore at the referee like i have never seen her doing that before, gave nasty comments to the linesman, even applauded to one, as he called a ball of Iroda "out" when the ball was like 2 meters wide, and basically acted like John Mc Enroe at his best days, to destroy Irodas rhythm and savety and it worked! Jelena finally took the third set of Tulyaganova 6-0 before Iroda even knew what was going on!

April 2002 saw her down with a left knee tendonitis, and after she has recovered from that injury, Iroda spent more time at the doctors as at the tennis courts because of all sorts of injuries, and every try for a come-back was stopped by a new injury.

In 2003 Iri, how she is called by her friends, tried her luck with a new coach, Dimitry Tomasevic, who is also from the former Russian Rupublic Usbekistan, and his work seems to pay off. The winner of the 1999 Wimbledon Girls title reached the final of Hyderabad, the quarters of Dubai and the 4th round of Key Biscane beating Maleeva and Bovina on these tournaments.

Iroda is a soft spoken player who enjoys reading, movies, exchanging e-mails and spends a lot of time with children from the Mehrijon Orphanage in Tashkent during her free time.

She is full of confidence for todays match after eliminating Safina yesterday and Rittner the day before, and also the webmaster of her official site: www.iroda-tulyaganova.com , Thomas Schulze, who was a great help for me by writing that preview, tried to make me believe that Iroda will win the match. But of course he could not convince me  :-)

The match will start at noon local time, which is 3am at Los Angeles, 6am at Montreal, 11am at London and 8pm at Sydney and will surprisingly NOT be played on Center Court, which also means there will be no tv-coverage :-(



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Gerhard
www.jelena-dokic.com