Canada’s Bianca Andreescu and China’s Yue Yuan advanced to the women’s doubles quarterfinals at the Wuhan Open without striking a ball Thursday.<\/p>\n
Top-seeded Italians Jasmine Paolini and Sara Errani withdrew before their match, giving Andreescu and Yuan a walkover victory.<\/p>\n
Paolini later reached the singles quarterfinals after her opponent, Denmark’s Clara Tauson, retired while trailing 3-6, 6-1, 3-1.<\/p>\n
Andreescu, of Mississauga, Ont., and Yuan will next face Kazakhstan’s Anna Danilina and Serbia’s Aleksandra Krunic, the No. 8 seeds.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Leylah Fernandez of Laval, Que., and partner Erin Routliffe of New Zealand were eliminated in the round of 16 on Thursday after falling 4-6, 6-4, 10-4 to Linda Noskova of the Czech Republic and Rebecca Sramkova of Slovakia.<\/p>\n
Routliffe, who lives in Montreal, regularly plays with another Canadian, Gabriela Dabrowski of Ottawa \u2014 the pair won the U.S. Open women’s doubles title last month.<\/p>\n
Women’s favourites advance<\/p>\n
U.S. Open champion Aryna Sabalenka’s winning streak at the Wuhan Open rolled on to 19 matches when she beat Liudmila Samsonova 6-3, 6-2 to advance to the quarterfinals of the WTA 1000-level tournament.<\/p>\n
Top-ranked Sabalenka’s streak includes winning titles at Wuhan in 2018, ’19 and ’24.<\/p>\n
No. 2-ranked Iga Swiatek also advanced, winning 7-6 (2), 6-4 against Belinda Bencic, the former Olympic champion.<\/p>\n
Swiatek improved to a 5-1 career record over Bencic, including a straight-sets win in the Wimbledon semifinals in July.<\/p>\n
In the late match, No. 3 Coco Gauff, coming off a semifinal loss to eventual champion Amanda Anisimova at the China Open last week, eased past Zhang Shuai 6-3, 6-2.<\/p>\n
Swiatek to face Paolini<\/p>\n
Sabalenka will next play eighth-seeded Elena Rybakina, who won 6-3, 6-4 over Linda Noskova and is seeking to earn an entry to the WTA Finals event in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n
Swiatek’s quarterfinals opponent is Jasmine Paolini and Gauff next plays Laura Siegemund.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Jessica Pegula recovered from an early service break in the third set to beat Ekaterina Alexandrova 7-5, 3-6, 6-3 and also advance to the final eight. Sixth-seeded Pegula, who lost in the China Open semifinals last week, levelled the deciding set at 2-2, then won four of the last five games for victory.<\/p>\n
The win over No. 9 Alexandrova came a day after Pegula needed seven match points to beat fellow American Hailey Baptiste in the second round.<\/p>\n
It was Pegula’s sixth straight three-set match, and for the fifth time, she won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canada’s Bianca Andreescu and China’s Yue Yuan advanced to the women’s doubles quarterfinals at the Wuhan Open without…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":{"0":"post-201999","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}