WASHINGTON – Canadians Victoria Mboko and Leylah Fernandez won their opening matches Monday at the Citi Open hardcourt tennis tournament.<\/p>\n
Mboko, a wild-card in Washington, came back from a break down in the second set to post a 6-2, 6-4 win over Russia’s Anastasia Potapova.<\/p>\n
Fernandez followed with a 6-3, 6-3 win over Australia’s Maya Joint.<\/p>\n
Mboko, an 18-year-old from Toronto, won 62.7 per cent of total service points compared to 50 per cent for Potapova.<\/p>\n
The Canadian had 13 break-point chances against Potapova and converted five of them, the last coming in the deciding game. Potapova scored two breaks on six chances.<\/p>\n
Mboko, who entered Washington with a career-high ranking of 86, will next face No. 12 Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan at the WTA 500 tournament.<\/p>\n
Mboko, who has played both at the WTA Tour level and on the lower-tier ITF World Tennis Tour circuit this year, improved her record this season to 46-8.<\/p>\n
She posted her fourth win of the season against a top-50 opponent as she prepares for her main-draw debut at the upcoming WTA 1000-level National Bank Open in Montreal.<\/p>\n
Fernandez of Laval, Que., fired five aces and broke Joint three times on seven chances in a win that took just 80 minutes to complete.<\/p>\n
The 22-year-old Canadian, ranked 36th in the world, saved the only break point she faced.<\/p>\n
Fernandez will next face top-seed Jessica Pegula of the United States. Pegula has won both of the previous meetings between the players, with both matches coming on hardcourt.<\/p>\n
In first-round doubles action, Eugenie Bouchard of Westmount, Que., and Clervie Ngounoue of the United were defeated 6-3, 6-1 by the American duo of Venus Williams and Hailey Baptiste.<\/p>\n
The 31-year-old Bouchard, a former world No. 5 and a Wimbledon finalist in 2014, is playing in her second-last tournament after announcing last week that she will retire after the National Bank Open.<\/p>\n
The 45-year-old Williams, a seven-time Grand Slam champion, is starting a comeback after more than a year away from tennis.<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 21, 2025.<\/p>\n
Note to readers:This is a corrected story. A previous version incorrectly had Mboko’s age at 19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON – Canadians Victoria Mboko and Leylah Fernandez won their opening matches Monday at the Citi Open hardcourt…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-13526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}