Eszter Meri<\/a> won the women’s singles gold medal at the 2025 Rhine-Ruhr FISU World University Games in Essen, Germany, on Saturday. \u00a0<\/p>\nMeri becomes the first tennis player from Slovakia and the first Longhorn tennis player to win gold at the games, while she is the second Longhorn women’s player to medal, along with Kelly Pace, who won bronze in 1995.<\/p>\n
Meri secured the title with a 6-3, 1-6, 7-5 win over Alevtina Ibragimova, an unattached player from Russia who is currently ranked No. 210 by the WTA with a career high of No. 196.<\/p>\n
Ibragimova broke first in the match for a 2-1 lead, however Meri broke right back for 2-2. Meri later broke again for her own lead of 4-2, which started a string of three-straight breaks before Meri served out the set, 6-3.<\/p>\n
Ibragimova managed the only two breaks for the second set for leads of 2-0 and 5-1, and although she also broke to open the third set, Meri responded with consecutive breaks to even it, 2-2, and then to extend to a 4-2 lead. Ibragimova was able to break back for 4-3, but after the next four games were on serve, Meri picked up the final break she needed to capture the gold, 7-5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Story Links
Essen, Germany \u2013\u00a0Texas Women’s Tennis sophomore Eszter Meri won the women’s singles gold medal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24356,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-24355","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\/24355","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=24355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}