{"id":925127,"date":"2026-10-08T09:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T09:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/925127\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T09:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T09:34:08","slug":"first-wta-1000-semifinal-bartunkova-beats-muchova-in-67-minutes-in-beijing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/925127\/","title":{"rendered":"First WTA 1000 semifinal! Bartunkova beats Muchova in 67 minutes in Beijing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No. 26 seed Nikola Bartunkova booked her place in the first WTA 1000 semifinal of her career in fine style on Thursday, needing just 67 minutes to defeat No. 7 seed Karolina Muchova 6-3, 6-0 at the China Open.<\/p>\n<p>In an inter-generational clash between Czech compatriots who train at the same club in Prague, the 20-year-old Bartunkova dominated proceedings by winning both the first five and the last seven games of the match against her 30-year-old countrywoman. The result was her third career Top 10 win, following her upsets of Belinda Bencic at the Australian Open and Aryna Sabalenka in the third round here. She advances to her third tour-level semifinal, following Guadalajara 2025 and Monterrey 2026, and first at WTA 1000 level.<\/p>\n<p>Bartunkova, who ended 2025 ranked No. 130 and has climbed to No. 34 this week, will make her Top 30 debut following Beijing. She will bid to reach her first career final against either No. 4 seed Mirra Andreeva or No. 19 seed Ekaterina Alexandrova.<\/p>\n<p>More to come&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No. 26 seed Nikola Bartunkova booked her place in the first WTA 1000 semifinal of her career in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":925128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593,5452],"class_list":["post-925127","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\/925127","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=925127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/925128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=925127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=925127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=925127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}