Russian teenager Mirra Andreeva reached her first Grand Slam final with a dominant victory over Ukraine’s Marta Kostyuk at the French Open.<\/p>\n
A beaten semi-finalist in 2024, Andreeva was hugely impressive throughout her 6-1 6-3 victory and will await compatriot Diana Shnaider, the 25th seed, or Polish qualifier Maja Chwalinska in Saturday’s final.<\/p>\n
The 19-year-old is third-youngest woman to reach the Roland Garros showpiece this century, after an 18-year-old Coco Gauff in 2022 and 17-year-old Kim Clijsters in 2001.<\/p>\n
Should she prevail, Andreeva would become the third-youngest first-time Grand Slam champion this century, after Maria Sharapova and Emma Raducanu.<\/p>\n
“I am still very, very nervous. I was nervous coming into this match,” Andreeva said.<\/p>\n
“All of these feelings combined, it is amazing – I have never felt anything like this before.”<\/p>\n
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provided an unavoidable backdrop to the contest, with Kostyuk regularly denouncing the war since it began in February 2022 – and being highly critical of athletes from Russia who have failed to do so.<\/p>\n
In keeping with the stance taken by Ukrainian players over the past four years, Kostyuk did not take a pre-match photo with Andreeva, and the players did not shake hands afterwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russian teenager Mirra Andreeva reached her first Grand Slam final with a dominant victory over Ukraine’s Marta Kostyuk…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":621122,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-621121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}