Montreal: Genie Bouchard extended her tennis career for at least one more match Monday, beating Emiliana Arango 6-4, 2-6, 6-2 in the first round of the National Bank Open.<\/p>\n
Bouchard, who reached the Wimbledon final and two other Grand Slam semifinals in 2014, announced this month that she would retire after a final appearance in her hometown tournament.<\/p>\n
She then opened it with her first WTA Tour victory since 2023 \u2014 and the 300th of her career \u2014 and advanced to face No. 17 seed Belinda Bencic.<\/p>\n
Bouchard reached No. 5 in the rankings in 2014 but the 31-year-old has largely switched to pickleball, playing just one match this season before being given a wild card into the Montreal tournament.<\/p>\n
After splitting the first two sets, Bouchard broke the 82nd-ranked Arango twice \u2014 first with a forehand, then from the Colombian\u2019s missed volley \u2014 to build a 5-1 lead in the decisive third.<\/p>\n
Arango broke back with Bouchard serving for the match to make it 5-2, but the Canadian went up 40-love in the ensuing game. Arango then sent her backhand wide on Bouchard\u2019s second match point.<\/p>\n
Bouchard waved and blew kisses to the crowd after the win.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told my family that if I won, I would come out of retirement,\u201d she said from center court. \u201cI felt like the old Genie out there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emma Raducanu, playing just two days after losing in the semifinals in Washington , beat Elena-Gabriela Ruse 6-2, 6-4. Naomi Osaka, in her first tournament since announcing she would no longer work with coach Patrick Mouratoglou , eliminated Ariana Arseneault 6-4, 6-2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Montreal: Genie Bouchard extended her tennis career for at least one more match Monday, beating Emiliana Arango 6-4,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30899,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,701,23936,1708,82,593,621],"class_list":["post-30898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-latest-news","tag-montreal-open","tag-national-bank-open","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-tennis-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30898","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=30898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}