Former champion and No. 8 seed Iga Swiatek opened her campaign for a second China Open title with a straight-sets win over local wild card Xinyu Gao in the second round in Beijing on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Swiatek, who won the title here in 2023, exchanged an early break of serve with the 244th-ranked Chinese player before gaining a two-break advantage to claim the first set 6-2. The Polish star, ranked No. 9, broke twice again in the second set to close out a 6-2, 6-3 win in 1 hour, 27 minutes.<\/p>\n
“For sure, it was a solid match,” Swiatek said after her win. “Many long rallies. I’m happy about that because I had a chance to get the rhythm of the court, feel the ball.\u00a0For sure a good start. I’m happy to be back here.”<\/p>\n
Here are some key numbers from Swiatek’s latest win:<\/p>\n
5: The number of break points Swiatek converted in the match from eight opportunities. Gao earned only one break point and converted it.<\/p>\n
6: This was Swiatek’s sixth opening-match win in seven WTA 1000 events this season. Her only opening-round loss at a WTA 1000 event this year came in Miami, where she fell to compatriot Magda Linette.<\/p>\n
6: This was Swiatek’s sixth win in seven matches against opponents ranked outside the Top 100. Her only loss came to No. 121-ranked Zheng Qinwen in the fourth round of the US Open.<\/p>\n
9: Swiatek has captured nine wins from her first 10 matches at this tournament. That is the most of any player, tying her with Coco Gauff and Svetlana Kuznetsova.\u00a0<\/p>\n
146: This was Swiatek’s 146th career main-draw match win at WTA 1000-level events. Only two currently active players have more career main-draw match-wins at the WTA 1000 level — Aryna Sabalenka (156) and Serena Williams (148).<\/p>\n
4: Swiatek holds a 4-0 record against her next opponent, No. 30 seed Donna Vekic. Vekic defeated another Chinese wild card, Lin Zhu, 6-4, 6-2 to book her place in the third round. Three of Swiatek’s four wins over Vekic have come in straight sets. This will be their fourth meeting on hard courts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Swiatek added that qualifying for the season-ending WTA Finals remains a big goal for her in the coming weeks<\/p>\n
“For sure that’s the goal. I’m going to be fighting for that. Obviously I’m aware. But it doesn’t change the fact that it still feels pretty far as there are many tournaments where you can gain many points.<\/p>\n
“I try to just take it step by step because if I’m focused only on the next match, this is where I perform my best. I’ve never been in this position, so for sure it’s another experience in my career.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former champion and No. 8 seed Iga Swiatek opened her campaign for a second China Open title with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":919100,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593,5452],"class_list":["post-919099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919099","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=919099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/919100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=919099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=919099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=919099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}