{"id":25835,"date":"2025-07-27T21:09:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-27T21:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/25835\/"},"modified":"2025-07-27T21:09:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T21:09:07","slug":"leylah-fernandez-breezes-past-anna-kalinskaya-for-dc-open-title","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/25835\/","title":{"rendered":"Leylah Fernandez breezes past Anna Kalinskaya for DC Open title"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON — Leylah Fernandez<\/a> collected the biggest title of her career at the DC Open with her most lopsided victory of the tournament, defeating Anna Kalinskaya<\/a> 6-1, 6-2 in the final on Sunday.<\/p>\n

The left-handed Fernandez, a 22-year-old from Canada who is ranked 36th, earned her fourth singles trophy — all have come at hard-court tournaments — and first at a WTA 500 event. She came quite close to a Grand Slam championship as a teenager at the 2021 US Open, making it all the way to the final in New York before losing to Emma Raducanu<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There almost was a rematch in Washington, but Kalinskaya eliminated Raducanu in the semifinals Saturday.<\/p>\n

Until Sunday, the 48th-ranked Kalinskaya had not dropped a set all week.<\/p>\n

However, she wasn’t able to keep up with Fernandez, who saved the only two break points she faced while taking four of Kalinskaya’s service games in a match that lasted 1 hour, 10 minutes. One key: Fernandez claimed 10 of the 12 points in the match when Kalinskaya hit a second serve.<\/p>\n

This was the first title for Fernandez since October 2023 at the Hong Kong Open.<\/p>\n

She arrived in Washington with a losing record this season and hadn’t won more than two matches at the same tournament since last November.<\/p>\n

With a mix of baseline excellence and strong net play, Fernandez’s path to the final included victories over top-seeded Jessica Pegula<\/a>, who was the US Open runner-up last year, and No. 3 seed Elena Rybakina<\/a>, the Wimbledon champion in 2022.<\/p>\n

The win against Rybakina in Saturday’s semifinals took three tiebreakers and more than three hours to decide.<\/p>\n

There was no such drama against Kalinskaya, a 26-year-old Russian who fell to 0-3 in tour-level finals. She lost to Jasmine Paolini<\/a> in Dubai and to Pegula in Berlin last year.<\/p>\n

The men’s final scheduled for later Sunday was No. 7 seed Alex de Minaur against No. 12 Alejandro Davidovich Fokina<\/a>, who defeated No. 1 Taylor Fritz<\/a> in the quarterfinals and No. 4 Ben Shelton<\/a> in the semifinals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON — Leylah Fernandez collected the biggest title of her career at the DC Open with her most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-25835","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\/25835","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=25835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}