other WTA triumph this year came in Abu Dhabi<\/a> just 10 months after the arrival of her first child – and less than four months since her return from more than a year out on maternity leave.<\/p>\n“I feel like Tokyo and Japan is a happy place in my career, a place where I’ve had good success and I just love being here,” said Switzerland’s Bencic, who won gold in the women’s singles at the Tokyo Olympics.<\/p>\n
“I had a deja vu moment on court. I had match point on the same side of the court, went for the same serve and was telling myself the same things. I had goosebumps, it was really special. It’s great to win here again.”<\/p>\n
When Bencic, a former world number four in 2020, returned to the sport in October 2024, her world ranking had dropped to 1,213.<\/p>\n
She has risen up to 13th in the rankings and earlier this year reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon before being beaten by eventual champion Iga Swiatek.<\/p>\n
“I’m really enjoying my time back on tour and I think it’s showing in the results,” she added.<\/p>\n
“I couldn’t be more happy and I’m definitely surprised. This was definitely not planned.”<\/p>\n
“It’s hard work but it’s a lot of self-belief and a lot of mental belief as well.<\/p>\n
“I’m really happy to have this confirmation with myself that I’m able to try to even beat my best ranking from before.”<\/p>\n
Noskova, 20, also lost the China Open final <\/a>at the start of the month and was looking to add to her solitary WTA win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Belinda Bencic claimed her second WTA title since becoming a mother by beating Linda Noskova in the Pan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":{"0":"post-241703","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241703","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=241703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}