MELBOURNE, Australia \u2014 Olivia Gadecki and John Peers became the first team to win consecutive Australian Open mixed doubles titles since 1989 after beating the French pair of Kristina Mladenovic and Manuel Guinard 4-6, 6-3, 10-8 on Friday.<\/p>\n
The Australians trailed 7-5 in the final-set tiebreaker before coming back to lead 9-7. On match point and with Peers serving, Guinard hit a backhand into the net to clinch victory for the home players at Rod Laver Arena.<\/p>\n
Wild-card entries Gadecki and Peers were the\u00a0first reigning Australian Open mixed doubles champions\u00a0to return to the final the following year since Mladenovic and Daniel Nestor in 2015. The 23-year-old Gadecki was born 13 years after Jim Pugh and Jana Novotna went back-to-back in 1988 and 1989.<\/p>\n
“Olivia, I\u2019m sort of speechless,\u201d Peers said at the trophy presentations. \u201cThank you for playing with me again, we had great fun this week and somehow snuck away with this one, but it\u2019s been so much fun sharing the court with you.\u201d<\/p>\n
The French team won the opening set on its second set point when Peers hit a shot wide, three games after Mladenovic double-faulted on set point and the Australian team broke to keep the set alive.<\/p>\n
In the second set,\u00a0Gadecki and Peers\u00a0went ahead 3-1 on a service break and then held to take a 4-1 lead, winning 13 of 15 points to put them in control of the set and level the match.<\/p>\n
Mladenovic was trying to win her fourth Grand Slam mixed doubles title \u2014 she won Wimbledon in 2013 and the Australian Open in 2014 with Nestor and the 2022 Australian Open mixed doubles title with Ivan Dodig. She also has six Grand Slam women’s doubles titles.<\/p>\n
“Winning a Grand Slam once is very difficult but defending it is even harder … big congrats to you!\u201d\u00a0Mladenovic said\u00a0to Gadecki and Peers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MELBOURNE, Australia \u2014 Olivia Gadecki and John Peers became the first team to win consecutive Australian Open mixed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-442474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442474","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=442474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}