Sara Errani, Olympic champion on fifth time of asking<\/p>\n
While 29-year-old Paolini was a late bloomer making her second Olympic appearance, Errani was vying for the elusive taste of gold. The former doubles world no. 1 arrived in France as a five-time major champion and career Grand Slam achiever, though never making it past the quarter-finals of an Olympic Games.<\/p>\n
Errani teamed up with Paolini, nine years her junior, in 2021, but it was not until they started playing together regularly two years later that the potential of this Italian duo started to blossom.<\/p>\n
In October 2023, Team Errani-Paolini collected their first team title at the aptly named Jasmin Open in Monastir, Tunisia. They won the WTA 250 final on a super tiebreak, and 10 months later, did the same for a sensational Olympic triumph.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember that it was my dream,\u201d Errani explained. \u201cI lost two times in the quarter-finals, in London [2012] and in Rio [2016]. I was thinking that I couldn’t reach it anymore, but then we started playing together and start dreaming, to qualify for the Olympics first. Then it was amazing, I mean, no words for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
With that triumph, the 38-year-old completed the Career Golden Slam in doubles, just the seventh female player to achieve that. After then guiding Italy to the 2024 Billie Jean King Cup, they returned to Paris this year to collect a new major honour \u2013 the Roland-Garros doubles trophy<\/a>, Paolini\u2019s first career Slam victory.<\/p>\n Errani explained of her Olympic accolade, \u201cWinning the gold there was a dream come true for me. I was always thinking about that and to reach it was unbelievable. We had a lot of fun, a lot of emotions, so I’m really happy to have won that gold.\u201d<\/p>\n The medals are now safely at home with their respective parents – \u201cThey are taking care of it\u201d, Paolini said with a smile, just as elated as she and Errani were the day they became Olympic champions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sara Errani, Olympic champion on fifth time of asking While 29-year-old Paolini was a late bloomer making her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":{"0":"post-42669","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\/42669","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=42669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}