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Lindsay Davenport Preview 26 year old Lindsay Davenport is surely one of the most outstanding players of the WTA. The girl from California has won so many tournaments (37) and has reached so many successes, its just impossible to write about all of them. Lindsay, who started playing tennis at the age of 7, has won the US-Open in 98, Wimbledon in 99 and the Australian Open in 2000. She has won the Olympic Gold Medal in 1996 and won the WTA-Championships in 99 in singles and 96, 97 and 98 in doubles. All that happened before the year 2001, and Lindsay was even able to top that successes! 2001 should become the most successful year for the righthanded player. In that year, she won amazing 7 Wta-titles, got awarded the WTA-player of the month in Oktober and November and had an overall record of 62 matches won and only 9 losses and reached the WTA-Championship final, where she had to withdraw because of injury. And guess what? Lindsay did even top that success! She did what no player did before her in the history of tennis! The most amazing success a player can ever reach. A success which is more worth as winning the Grand Slam and the Olympic Gold Medal in one Year! She beat Jelena Dokic 5 times in a row! She beat her at the Australian Open 4-6, 6-4 and 6-3, and did not allow the hottest player on the tour to win a single set at Wimbledon, Zürich, Linz and Munich! By far the greatest success in her career! All together Lindsay leads the series vs. Jelena 6-0, which should make her to the clear favourite today, but remember that Jelena was down in the series to Martinez 5-0 and drew to 5-5 on wednesday! And the chances to beat her has never been as big as now, because Lindsay is just coming back from an 8 months lasting injury break. But those who think Jelena will have an easy match tomorrow will be warned. Though the match on Wednesday vs. Anne Kremer was the first match in 2002 for the current no9 of the world, and she fired the girl from Luxembourg 6-3 and 6-0 away, and proved her cleverness by not re-entering the WTA until she was 100% fit. I had the honour to watch Davenport live twice and especially as she beat Amanda Coetzer at the WTA-Championships 2001 I was deeply impressed. Not because of the win, or how she had won. The impressing thing was what happened after the match: Because Lindsay won in something like 50 minutes, and there has been nearly an hour break to the next match, she re-entered the court 10 minutes after her win, to have a training session with her coach! In front of 13.000 spectators! Some guy next to me mentioned: "Well, i guess she payed the court for a whole hour, and now she want to use the full time......" |
Article
by Gerhard Grundhammer